


If Thy Face Offend Me, Cut It Off

by rokhal



Category: Evil Dead (Movies), Supernatural
Genre: (sort of), Abandoned Mine, Blood, Calm and Rational Ash Williams, Codependency, Deadites, Decapitation, Demon Blood, Dismemberment, Divorce, Evil Sam Winchester, Extreme Gore, F/M, Female Character of Color, Gen, Ghost Town, Gore, Guts - Freeform, Lovecraftian Horrors, Original Female Character(s) - Freeform, Overprotectiveness, Scary Dean Winchester, Wildlife, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-24
Updated: 2013-11-15
Packaged: 2017-12-30 09:24:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 36,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1016925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rokhal/pseuds/rokhal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ash teams up with the Winchester Brothers to clean some Deadites out of an abandoned chapel in the woods. There is trust and cooperation all around and the entire operation goes smoothly.</p><p>Hah, just kidding.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Gathering of Heroes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 10% Raimi. 20% Kripke. 15% loving parody of the works of H.P. Lovecraft. 5% man-pain, 50% crack. And 100% reason to host a multi-fandom horror marathon this Halloween.

“You been on the web two days. Watcha got?”

“Nothing to get excited over.”

“But something. Hit me.”

“Yuppies disappearing in the woods.”

“Location?”

“Adirondack Park. Tahawus mine.”

“So saddle up, Geek Boy, let’s move.”

“Dean—you hate this kind of case.”

“I do? Thought that was you, with no excuse to spend a wild night in a library.”

“You do. You hate hiking. You hate wildlife. You hate camping.”

“Maybe it’s grown on me.”

Silence.

“People change, Sam.”

“Survivor’s in the Alleghenny mental hospital. Should be a riot.”

 

* * *

 

 

The nuthouse was brilliant with light, immaculate with whitewash and bleach, secure as a bank vault. Every corner was bright. Linus had asked the staff to clear out the furniture and leave the lights on at all times, and with the head psychiatrist’s permission, they had grudgingly complied.

Linus spent his days turning random numbers over on an abacus, and his nights, near as he could tell that it was night, with one finger on his pulse and one ear to the crack under the door. He ate when he was hungry, slept when he dropped, and refused to see visitors. When the staff came in to check on him, he would back himself into a corner and shake until they left.

When two tall men in orderly’s uniform entered his room, he was not alarmed that they were unfamiliar. He was alarmed that they were in his room.

“Some publicist,” scoffed the man in front. His hair was cropped, and he had a bright sharp gaze like a guard dog and the swagger of a cop. Which he obviously was not, hence the pretense. The one in the back was taller and milder-looking, better for an orderly, but his hair was far too long, cut well past his chin. Long enough to grab. Strong enough to throw Linus against the opposite wall.

But in the right circumstances, anyone could be strong enough to throw Linus against the opposite wall.

“Linus Evans?” the bruiser in front asked as his larger companion softly shut the heavy white door. “I’m Pete, this is my buddy Simon. We’re new to the floor, and to get to know you nuts—” His companion kicked him in the ankle. “—inpatients, whatever—we  were requested to meet with you guys individually and hear your story in your own words.”

Linus bristled. He knew rules. This was against a lot of them. “I’m not accepting visitors,” he murmured.

‘Pete’ was not deterred. “Just a couple minutes, and you can back to doing . . . whatever it is you do.”

“Not minutes,” Linus insisted from his sanctum in the corner of the room opposite the door. “Not seconds. No visitors. No visits. No chats. Meals twice a day, through the slot in the door, like I asked. Bathroom access three times daily through the shared door. Physical checks once a day. And since there is no way on God’s earth you two are orderlies, I’m still due a physical check at four o’clock.”

‘Pete’ knelt in front of him, and ‘Simon’ left the door to loom over them both. “You seem pretty with it to be sticking around so long in the cuckoo’s nest,” he quipped.

“I’m a danger to myself and others,” Linus growled. “I can’t be released. I can’t be taken out.”

“About that,” said Simon. His voice was less deep, more cutting. “Word is, you haven’t shown signs of violent behavior since your arrival.”

Linus jerked back against the wall. His hands would be shaking if they weren’t wrapped around his knees. “I can prove it,” he gasped.

Pete waved dismissively. “Nah. Dude, you want to spend the rest of your life in a hermetically sealed box of cotton balls, that’s your business. Nobody’s gonna pry you outta here.”

“What we want to know,” Simon added, “is what put you here.”

Linus glared at them. “I’m crazy. I know what I remember wasn’t real, but it’s all I remember, so don’t get mad when the crazy guy you picked to interview tells you a pile of crazy.”

Pete grinned. “We had to con our way into your room, we got no room to get pissy about anything.”

“All right then.” Linus steeled himself. “Could you sit over by that wall.”

His visitors obligingly sat.

“Say, what are you going to do about the surveillance cameras?” Linus asked.

“Spliced in a loop sequence,” Simon explained. “We have a couple hours.”

Linus shivered. “I suppose it wouldn’t do much good to call an orderly, either.”

Pete showed his teeth in something that was not quite a smile. “Catches on quick, doesn’t he?”

Simon kicked him again. “Don’t scare him,” he hissed.

“Somehow I doubt I rate very high on his personal terror alerts,” Pete remarked. “Go on, kid. The truth in your own words.”

The story itched in him, like a canker sore begging to be chewed. “Me and some friends from trail-running—weekend thing, trail-running—we wanted to try a hike-to-camp, try some trails deeper in the mountains. Adventure, see the stars, you know. There were five of us. You can get the obits out of the papers last week, I’m not reciting ‘em to you.

“It got dark early and it was way too cold. But we came over a ridge as the sun was setting and we found this old church . . .

“I wish we’d died out there in the woods. The trees were . . . I can’t even say anymore, but the things in the church . . .

“It got into every one of us.”

 

* * *

 

 

“Zombies.” Dean grinned as he plied the huge old black sedan along the tortuous pre-FDR byways of Upstate New York.

Sam groaned. “Zombies are shades of the living. They’re not grotesque. You gotta die first for a necromancer to turn you into a zombie. And they don’t fly!”

“Crouching Hunter, Hidden Zombie!”

“They’re not zombies! There’s no such thing as—”

“Are you seriously gonna try to say that with a straight face?”

Sam sighed and scowled out the window.

“Real, undead, juicy, _flying_ Romero-style zombies, Sam. How can you not be pumped about this case?”

“You know what the problem with Romero zombies is, Dean?” Sam demanded. “Splatter.”

Dean grimaced.

“Brains. Bone. Blood. Eyeballs. On everything.”

Dean felt his zombie-killing buzz begin to wilt.

“Rotten zombie juice in your mouth.”

“I get it! Shut up!”

Sam sulked. Dean thought about cold blue skies.

“You know what this means,” Sam said after a silence of several minutes. “Unidentified fugly, good witness description, inaccessible area.”

Dean grumbled.

“We need Bobby’s books. I’ll call Garth.”

 

* * *

 

 

The lathe screamed. The circular saw howled. The forge roared. The hydraulic hammer clanged. Steel ingots of varying alloys and carbon content bowed to the vision of their master and flowed into shape.

A phone on the wall shrilled feebly, flashing a tiny light. The man at the power hammer pulled his half-shaped bar of steel out, shut down the motor, and crossed the workshop in a few strides to snatch the handset off the cradle.

“Yello.”

“Asharoonie, how’s it hangin’?” came an overly cheerful voice, male and vaguely adolescent.

“New guy,” Ash replied. “How many times I gotta tell ya—I’m not a pasta, and I’m sure as hell not your errand boy. I got one job. It’s covered.”

“I read you, man,” said the de facto Hunter dispatcher, Garth Fitzgerald IV. “Necronomicon ex Mortis, Deadites, you and the Evil Book of Evil and your special bond—”

“Don’t get smart, kid—”

“I’m not calling in Spiderman to take on the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, here. This is totally your bag.”

“Looks pretty quiet from where I’m standing,” Ash said warily.

“Upstate New York?”

Ash slammed his right hand on the nearest workbench, bouncing and scattering tools. “What—they—What’s it doing in New York? The book’s locked down—There’s nothing—Who’d you hear this from?”

“The Winchesters.”

“No way, they’re still alive?”

“For a given value of ‘still’—yeah, they got a witness. Putrefaction, levitation, grabby trees, the works. Some desecrated chapel up in the hills.”

“And the Brothers Grimm found the site, so they’ll want a piece of the action,” Ash grumbled.

“Aw, you’ll like them.”

“They’re a menace.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Ashster, but—”

“I get it, I get it. What’s the number?”

“You’re the best there is at what you do, man. Knew I could count on you.”

“Don’t make me regret it.”

 

* * *

 

 

Two black cars pulled in to a fallow field among a dense hardwood forest outside Saratoga Springs: one, a meticulously maintained 1967 Chevrolet Impala, the other, a heavily armored 1991 Dodge full-size van. Dust plumed in their tracks as they stopped.

Three men got out and sized each-other up: from the van, Ash Williams, tall and dark and going gray at the edges, with a steel prosthetic right hand and bloodlust burned into his bones; from the sedan, Sam and Dean Winchester, thirties and fighting fit, cynical after having faced down the brightest angels and foulest demons and found them all incompetent, self-serving dicks.

“The disaster duo,” Ash called out over the ten feet of dust and gravel that separated their respective war machines. “How’s the gypsy life treating you?”

“FBI got us our fifteen minutes of fame, but the limelight’s moved on and it’s all booze, babes, grifting, and the open road,” Dean rumbled. Across the roof of the car, Sam rolled his eyes. “How’s retail?”

“Hell. I don’t know how I’d get up in the morning if it weren’t for the royalties pouring in from my six patents.”

Sam straightened from a strategic slouch to his full imposing height. “I’m sorry, is this a hunt or a dick-measuring contest?”

Ash showed his teeth. “No contest, bucko.”

Sam snorted. “Garth says you’re the expert on these revenants. How do we play this?”

Ash turned and slid open the van’s cargo door, revealing a mattress, bars lining the windows, Sumerian and Akkadian protection symbols on every flat surface in silver paint, a rack of five shotguns, and a Punisher poster. “The name of the game is total bodily dismemberment.”

“Decapitation doesn’t do the trick?” Dean clarified.

“Barely slows ‘em down. I’ve had ‘em pitch the heads at me. Decent aim. And they bite.”

“Like rattlesnakes,” Sam mused.

“Chattier. And it’s no picnic afterwards—somebody gets bit, you gotta lop a limb off or blow their head off. I hear most Hunters do the deed with handguns—silver, blessed iron—but if you’re after Deadites, you gotta be handy with short-range buckshot and blades.” Ash snatched up one of the lightweight chainsaws from the back of the van. “Really big blades.”

Dean’s eyes widened. “I knew these were my kind of zombies.”

Sam skirted to the driver’s side of their sedan and popped the trunk, shoved some heavy duffel bags toward the back, and lifted a false bottom, revealing a smorgasbord of firearms, knives, mystical herbs and talismans, moldy books, and a gift-store dream-catcher. He pulled out a pair of machetes and handed the smaller one to his brother.

Dean waved the blade away, reached deep into the weapons locker, and withdrew something that was not a machete, and definitely not of modern make: a war axe made from a humanoid femur bound close to a two-foot blade of rippling dark stone. Ash clenched his teeth at the sight, and Sam eyed the weapon almost hungrily.

Ash pointed out a sapling, about four inches thick, standing off a stride’s length from the rest of the trees.  “Let’s see you muscle through _that_ without horsepower,” he challenged.

Sam and Dean shrugged at each-other, and Dean waved Sam at the tree. With a fluid swing that twisted from the toes to the shoulders of his six-four frame, Sam lopped off the top of the tree in a single powerful blow, then caught the crown and shoved it away as it fell. Dean pushed up beside him and swung his savage, fragile-looking bone weapon. A perfect inch-thick slice of alder popped into the air, and the glittering stone blade was impossibly unharmed.

Ash lifted his saw, then shrugged and lowered it, still cold. “Okay, tough guys, but in ten years, don’t come crying to me about your tennis elbow.”

 

* * *

 

 

Finished with the dick-measuring contest—Sam was pleased, in a grade-school way, that he and his brother had won that one—they adjourned to the nearest sports bar. Ash had found the one screen with hockey on and parked them in front of it, ordered a pitcher of Bud Light, and asked the waitress to “keep the hot stuff coming, sweetheart.” By which he meant the Atomic Fire Wings. Sam was relieved there hadn’t been a Hooters in the area, or he’d be suffocating under the combined tackiness of his brother and their temporary partner.

Sam crunched on a celery stick and picked breading off his wings. His I-Pad shared the table with his plate, and the touch-screen was a hopeless greasy mess, no matter how high the pile of used napkins at his elbow grew.

“So I drank the juice, said the words, and here I am,” Ash concluded, spreading his mis-matched hands over the growing boneyard of wing-joints and grease-paper that had overtaken the table.

“So your car’s a history mystery,” Dean mused. “I don’t know if that’s awesome or tragic.”

“Tragic,” Ash growled. “I land fifteen years too late, presumed dead, in England, and without a dime to my name—‘my own time,’ my ass. That woulda been a solid five grand in plane ticket and bread money.”

Dean’s face fell. He’d managed to get loose after five beers, which was an improvement over his Charles Bukowski impression two years ago, but cars were one of his weird tender spots that Sam didn’t think he’d want to leave exposed. “Hey, you ever hear about the time Dean stabbed an angel in the face?” Sam interrupted.

Ash cocked his head. “No kidding. What makes you call it an angel?”

Dean took a pull of his beer and clonked it down. “Smug entitled cosmic fart torturing my family to get me to let their brat of a leader wear me like a custom tux so he could start the Apocalypse—yeah, I’d call that an angel. He just—” Dean’s eyes went distant. “Lit up with white fire—left the poor sucker of a vessel dead on the floor—”

Ash looked oddly crestfallen, like a kid just finding out that Santa Claus was actually a European fertility god who wasn’t into filling stockings so much as eating civilians. Sam knew the feeling.

“Hey, you hear about the time Sam ganked a vamp with a roll of razor wire?”

“No kidding,” Ash said again, brighter. “How’d that go?”

Sam flushed. Dean grinned beside him and elbowed him in the ribs. “Garroted ‘im,” Dean said proudly. “Popped the head clean off.” Sam spread his hands, revealing faint scars on his palms.

Ash shook his head and cleaned off a buffalo wing in one bite. “You guys need some actual tools,” he remarked through a mouthful of chicken skin.

“You use what you’ve got,” Sam replied. He coughed and sipped his lager. “Speaking of—you ever try an exorcism on these things? Even if they’re not standard black-eye demons, there should be something that’ll shift ‘em.”

“Kid,” Ash snapped, pounding his right fist on the table hard enough to rattle every plate. The gears whirred. “I read. I been fighting these things since I got back. There’s two things that’ll shift a Deadite, same as when I started, and that’s direct sunlight and the power of love. And you got no leg to stand on if we’re talking about saving hosts.”

“Right,” Sam said, spreading his hands peaceably even as he glared down his nose at the older man, “Just offering a suggestion.”

“Yeah, ‘offer,’” Ash growled. “You survive that hell, you can talk, but—”

“Hey,” Dean cut in, a commanding John Winchester ‘knock it off’ rumble. “We here to gank demon-zombies or play ‘my hell was worse than your hell’? ‘Cause living it once was bad enough, trust me.”

Sam started to smirk until Dean kicked him in the ankle. “We should think about packing it in,” Sam announced. “It’s a long drive and it sounds like we’ll want daylight on our side.”

Ash nodded and reached for another wing, then froze and stared at the plasma screen on the wall. A fight had broken out; Sam watched as the two squads of men flocked tight around two furiously scuffling figures. “Go for him, go for him, go for him!” Ash muttered, then, “Yes! That’s how we do it in Detroit, punk-ass!” The referee penetrated the knot of players and separated the fighters. Both retreated to the bench, one bleeding, the other fouled.

Sam huffed.

“Whatsa matter, can’t stand a little blood?” Ash demanded with a feral smirk.

“Not that,” Sam said. “It’s a game. The whole point of a game is that people don’t get hurt. And now the guy who started it is off the ice.”

“Sacrifice play,” Ash countered. “The Hurricanes draft good, but rough ‘em up a little and they shake easy. Wings’ll tear ‘em to pieces.”

Dean rose heavily and bent over the back of his chair. “Gotta piss,” he grunted.

Sam ate another celery stick. “Hiking in the woods tomorrow. Fun times.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Endlessly baffled by the dearth of _Supernatural/Evil Dead_ crossovers, I finally created my own.
> 
> _Supernatural_ has an exhaustive and mostly self-consistent body of canon. The _Evil Dead_ franchise doesn't, really. 
> 
> Sam and Dean are in the early part of Season 8, after Dean returns from Purgatory and is deeply disappointed in Sam as a brother and hurts Sam very hard in his feelings.
> 
> Ash is still in his early forties, because let's face it, Bruce Campbell is no longer in Hunting trim. The timeline I made up for Ash is:  
> In 1981, the year Evil Dead was released, a college-aged Ash with or without his buddies go to a cabin in the woods during break and Ash is the sole survivor. The following night, the events of _Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn_ occur, and Ash is sucked into the middle ages, where the events of _Army of Darkness (1992)_ occur, and Ash returns to the future. Unfortunately, the potion used to get him there overshoots the mark by a couple years, and he lands in the mid-'90s. Ash therefore vanished from the face of the Earth for about fifteen years between 1981 and 1996-ish, alienating his family and friends, and condemning him to a lonely life of S-Mart stocking and Deadite eradication.
> 
> The main fanons that inspired Ash's portrayal here are Ash's page on TV Tropes, the works of Missy here on AO3, and the epic, page-turning, Kripke-esque (seriously, I would not be surprised if the guy was a writer for SPN; he's obviously involved in the film and television industry) series works of Omarsnake on FFnet and on his own web page Omar's Snakepit.


	2. Engaging the Enemy

Dean and Ash both drove out to the site—Dean taking the Impala because there was no way he was trusting himself to another man’s wheels or leaving her unattended, and Ash taking his van because it was a rolling fortress. As they hummed over the river and through the woods, Dean cranked CCR and Sam regaled him with the history of the mining town that time, economics, and the Adirondack National Forest Preserve had swallowed.

“The blast furnaces and puddling crucibles from the iron mine are on the South bank, and the titanium refinery from the sixties is on the North. The town that’s there now is mostly remnants from the titanium mine before it closed down in 1989.”

“Anything fishy?”

“Records aren’t online from back then.” Sam scowled down at this I-Pad, betrayed. “Linus Evans described a chapel in the woods, which is definitely not the one from the 1850’s or the 1960’s.”

“So, what, billionaire miner wines and dines his own personal god and it bites back when it gets bored?”

“Could be, could be some run-of-the-mill denominational conflict.”

“Wish Cuckoo coulda given us coordinates at least. What kind of wilderness hikers were these guys?”

“Lazy ones,” Sam remarked, as the crumbling two-lane blacktop shot straight into the middle of the thirty-year-old ghost town.

“Huh.” The dense late-summer forest took a step back from the road, revealing rows of low-slung buildings in various stages of ruin: some roofless cinder-block structures, some wood-sided tract homes half-squashed by the palms of blizzard and rain-rot. As gaps appeared in the broadleaf woods that shrouded the mine, a little kettle-lake appeared, with a steep stony far shore and a hint of a lonely stone blast furnace atop a small ridge. The water was steel-gray under the low-hanging clouds. There was no sign of a chapel.

Dean parked on the roadside, just as the crackerbox buildings petered out and the woods crept close again. “Drive through service,” he remarked, getting out.

Ash’s van rumbled by and parked a few carlengths past them. Ash jumped out, winced at some old injury, and hollered at them as he dragged equipment out of the back. “Get a move on! I wanna be in Albany before sunset!”

 

* * *

 

 

Ash traveled heavy. The Winchester brothers had their bag of tricks—a saw-back machete, the creepy-ass thigh-bone battle-axe Dean favored, a sawed-off 12-guage apiece with shells loaded for ghost or corporeal, and a flare gun in case they got lost or ran into any Wendigoes. Ash had his favorite saw, two quarts of fuel, tools to tune-up his hand, his lever-action sawed-off, conventional ammo, road flares, a pen, explosives, a travel-pack of toilet paper, and fifteen more pounds of modern necessities. He shared some of the load with Sam, who was about the size of an actual pack mule.

The Adirondack Forest Preserve was a trackless void on the road atlas, a punishing march over monotonous bracken-choked hills, a chill green dreary shade. The woods rustled and whispered, ceaseless, formless noise, leaves twisting and glimmering in Ash’s peripheral vision, and every five steps he had to spin around at the weight of an intelligent gaze on the back of his neck. It was always one of the Winchesters whenever he checked.

God, he hated hiking. The things he did for the human race.

Step one was to find the chapel. The civvie in the nuthouse—sweet digs, nuthouses, Ash could almost see the attraction—could only report that his hiking buddies had stumbled on the place after tearing around the woods, tirelessly and implacably pursued by an invisible force of Evil. Which mean that the chapel could be hours in any direction from town or it might not even exist in this plane.

The Winchesters had some kind of ghost-hunter abandoned-ruin-radar, Sam pointing at various ripples on the topographical map on his phone and Dean leading them through the woods in an apparently random zig-zag. No chapels yet, but they had found the footprint of a two-hundred-year-old woodpile and a ten-by-ten-foot square of tumbled rocks. The sun was straight overhead, slicing spotlight dapples through the canopy. Noon put them minutes away from afternoon, which put them on the wrong side of the slope down to nightfall. “You guys wanna hurry this up? ‘Cause if we don’t scorched-earth some Deadites in the next hour, I’m gonna scram and you two civvies can figure this out on your own.”

Sam raised an eyebrow skeptically and looked down his big pointy nose at Ash. Ash bet Sam looked down his nose at just about everybody. But Dean gave him a sympathetic grin. “That bad, huh?”

“These things can mess with your mind; daylight’s the only advantage we got.” Ash flexed his right arm and made his fingers ball into a fist.

“Tell you what. Sam, we’ll need a lookout ridge. I’ll climb a tree, and if I can see the chapel through the canopy we’ll go gank some zombies. No dice, we try again in the morning.”

Devil-may-care ghost hunters with all their original limbs thought they knew everything. “Betcha twenty bucks there’s no actual chapel.”

The Winchesters shrugged at each-other, and Ash felt they’d made some joke at his expense telepathically.

After another twenty-six minutes tramping around in the loamy hills, ducking low-hanging branches and slipping past vine-tangled elms and alders, they hit a crest of hill and Dean located a suitable pine tree. Sam boosted him up, then spent the next ten minutes staring anxiously up at his brother’s ass. “Anything?” Sam bellowed when Dean disappeared into the crown.

Ash tried to ignore the crawling in his guts as he waited for Dean’s reply.

“Steeple, a couple miles east-by-northeast,” Dean hollered down. “We’re in business.”

Ash’s bones hummed with adrenaline, and his heart hammered. “Groovy,” he said, and for the life of him he couldn’t say whether or not he was being sarcastic.

 

* * *

 

 

Dean clambered down from the tree, energized and covered in pine pitch. Sam plotted the heading of the chapel on his map application and they marched off, Dean looking more wired and Ash more antsy by the minute. At two o’clock, Sam smelled the faint remnants of woodsmoke, and minutes later the whitewashed salt-box of a New England chapel broke the canopy open before them. It was in fair condition, a little mildew lifting the paint off the siding, a few shattered panes of rippled 1800’s glass, some missing shutters and shingles and some stones crumbling out of a low foundation. Last year’s dead grass and perennials were all flattened and trampled around the door, and some of the foundation stones had been ringed into a firepit.

Dean flicked on his EMF meter, which flashed like an ambulance signal and squawked so loud it startled a flock of crows from a nearby hemlock. “Looks like the place.”

“This foundation is hand-stacked,” Sam announced, “but the siding is at least 1950’s.”

Dean pried a loose slip of painted pine up from one corner of the structure, and tapped the support beam underneath. “70’s,” he corrected. “Treated lumber.”

“So the chapel existed in some form during the iron mine, and what we’re looking at now was either well-maintained or recently re-built,” Sam concluded.

“Somebody went to a lot of trouble to pray in privacy,” said Dean.

“Tell you what,” Ash cut in. “We see any cuneiform, we burn the place down.” Then he unholstered his shotgun, took the front steps three at a time, and kicked in the main doors, stumbling a bit when they flew open without resistance.

Sam shrugged at Dean, Dean nodded back, and they followed him in, shotguns and flashlights aimed.

The interior was dark and restful, the air heavy and dry with the echoes of reverence, sincerity, and fear; there was a sharp meaty smell of blood and rot, which coincided with the finger-paint streaks of blood behind the lectern, under  some of the windows, and trailing along the floor. There were a dozen short pews shoved into a rough semicircle around the remains of a camp—North Slope down mummy bags, an LED lantern that still glowed cool white and slashed shadows among the rafters, a few bags of trail mix and freeze-dried pasta. Sam saw no crosses anywhere, none above the lectern and none carved into any of the pews, railings, or moldings. The chapel was unmarked.

Something croaked above them, and with a startled cry, Ash whirled and fired into the air. Sam raised his own weapon to meet the threat, only to catch a half-exploded crow to the face. He dodged backward, flung the crow away, banged the backs of his knees against an overturned pew, and slammed to the ground, nearly cracking his skull open and barely managing not to fire buckshot at random.

“You want the number for that truck?” Dean called. Sam flipped him off and heaved himself back to his feet, catching Dean’s hand when he offered it.

Sam scowled at Ash. “Can we at least keep the friendly fire to a minimum?”

“You’re either quick or you’re dead,” Ash snapped. “You two still admiring the interior décor, or you wanna de-animate some corpses?” He pointed to a spot on the floorboards where three trails of bloody handprints converged and disappeared, a trap-door at the apse. “Gimme my bag back.”

Sam shrugged off Ash’s heavy duffel bag and passed it over, then watched as Ash used his left hand to unclip some clasps at the wrists of the gauntlet that covered his right. He got a shock when Ash popped the whole thing off—he’d only half-listened to his tale at the sports bar, and by the way the thing moved, he’d assumed there had to be at least a thumb and a couple finger joints left under there. This Ash had to be as good with machines as Roadhouse Ash had been with computers. The hand detached from a steel cap that covered the stump of his wrist, and the cap fitted into a socket in the body of a two-foot chainsaw. It looked like something off the cover of a Meatloaf album.

“Dude,” Dean exclaimed, bubbling with admiration. “You’re like that go-go dancer in _Grindhouse_.”

Ash lowered his weapons and glowered at him. “Ruin everything, why don’t you.”

Sam massaged the tight spot between his eyebrows. “Blades, buckshot—safety flares? I think we’re good. Let’s just head downstairs.”

Ash kicked at the ring on the trap door. “Somebody lend me a hand.”

Sam hooked two fingers in the ring and hauled the panel up, noting loosened boards and a rustling sound that stopped before the panel was half-way open. The rancid meat smell was worse now, competing with the damp close smell of mold and spiders that clung to dark places like this. Ash half-stepped backward as the door yawned open, his shotgun never wavering from the darkness below. He was making Sam nervous by osmosis.

Dean cracked open one of Ash’s safety flares and pitched it down, covering the stench with acrid smoke and lighting up the tight earthen-walled space brighter than the woods outside. An untrustworthy log step-ladder lead to the bottom, where a few splashes of dark liquid and shreds of clothing lay.

“Another,” Ash demanded, and Dean tossed a second flare down behind the ladder. “Hope you’re ready to rumble,” Ash muttered, a frenzied light in his dark eyes, and he scrambled frontways down the ladder, balancing on the narrow rungs and landing in a crouch, shotgun at the ready and chainsaw up and out of the way. He pivoted back and forth on his feet a few times, flashing a snarl of rage or terror. Sam flicked his eyes at him and Dean grimaced and shrugged.

Sam descended the step ladder while gripping the floor overhead for balance, and Dean jumped down behind him. The loam was thick and spongy under his boots. The walls were earth and stone, tree roots shoving them up in some places, tearing them apart in others. Sam stepped on something thick and springy, a wallet. They all backed close into a defensive triangle.

“Where’s the bodies?” Dean asked.

“Well, _fiddlesticks,_ ” Ash barked, jarringly bright. His face was locked in a terror-stricken rictus, a parody of a grin. “Guess they figured Little Ol’ Ash was too much macho to handle. Pack it up, men!” As Ash sidestepped toward the ladder, overwide eyes never leaving the garishly lighted walls, Sam caught a shuffle and the sound of falling earth. He pivoted, and across over the back of Dean’s head, he saw a rot-warped corpse, white eyes, lurching with leering loosened teeth and outstretched talons at Dean.

In the same breath, Dean swung his battleaxe, and Sam and Ash fired their sawed-offs at point-blank range. The corpse’s head simultaneously flew across the cellar and exploded into pink and black gore.

“Mother—” Dean snarled, glaring at Sam. At Dean’s feet, the headless carcass stretched up an arm and half-staggered, half-levitated to its feet.

“Move!” Sam bellowed, pumping his 12-guage. Dean stood there, squinting at him for precious instants while Sam lunged sideways, trying to set up his shot. Beside them, Ash did something with the pull cord to the chainsaw and the holster straps across his chest that sent the motor roaring to life. The headless carcass turned from Dean and raised its pallid hands defensively.

“High five!” Ash bellowed, and swiped both hands off in a powerful swing that sent them bouncing against the floorboards overhead.

“Dude!” Dean yelped, ducking the saw on the return swing. He spun, finally saw the tattered corpse, hauled back his battleaxe, and cleaved a leg off at the knee. “Now that’s what I call a zombie!”

In a few minutes’ gory work, they chopped the Deadite into immobile chunks—major joints disarticulated, hands that clung to the floor joists and burrowed into the ground like crabs pulped by a blast of buckshot apiece. They loaded the bits into one of the duffel bags and hauled them outside the chapel to spread out in the anemic sun. The chunks abruptly stopped twitching, and the stark pallor and black ooze turned to putrescent green skin and brown, watery blood.

“How’s EMF?” Sam asked Dean, whose back was turned. Dean ignored him. Sam reached into Dean’s coat pocket, and Dean jumped and seized him by the wrist.

“Dude.”

“EMF?”

“What?” Dean wiped gore off his pinky and twisted it in his ear.

“Dude, did I blow your eardrums?” Sam demanded, voice rising.

“I think you assholes blew my eardrums,” Dean whined. “I can barely hear you.”

Sam cursed. He’d been deafened by gunfire now and then Hunting, and every time it’d been a nerve-wracking pain in the ass with the constant fear of permanent hearing loss. The middle of a national park in pursuit of an unknown number of demonic zombies was not the time or the place for it. “E. M. F.” Sam shouted, miming waving the reader around in his hands.

Dean squinted at him again. “EMF?”

Sam nodded. Dean dug the reader out and flicked it on. There was a faint whistle and one of the LEDs flickered. Dean held it to his ear, gave up, and scowled at it.

“That your handy-dandy ghost detector?” Ash asked, leaning in.

“Ghosts, demons, active witchcraft, poltergeists—spirit activity in general,” Sam said.

“How sensitive?”

“Hit or miss,” Sam admitted.

Ash glared at the chapel. “We gotta check again.”

Sam huffed and nodded. “You never said anything about them coming out of the walls.”

“Coulda sworn I did.” Ash revved his chainsaw and twirled his shotgun by the action lever, chambering another shell. He re-entered the chapel, staring frantically into every corner as though anticipating an ambush, and Sam followed, a little unnerved himself. Dean’s footsteps shifted the boards behind him. “What, these things run in packs?” Dean asked.

“The bodies never disappear,” Ash muttered. Sam held up five fingers, then lowered two: five hikers, and only two accounted for.

“Two down, three to go,” Dean mused, too loud.

The flares in the basement blazed undisturbed, making the cracks in the floor glow and masking the corpse-rot with the smell of gunpowder. They descended the ladder again. They resumed their defensive triangle and circled the cellar, prodding nervously at the earthen walls every two feet, ready to blast or slice any rotting horror that came lurching out. None did.

“Let’s call it,” Ash said, setting his shotgun on the floor to free his remaining hand to shut off the chainsaw. “I’d say that was easy, but that’s a guaran-damn-tee fate’ll serve us up a fresh plate of shit.”

“Man, that was easy,” Dean remarked. “Romero zombies aren’t that tough without the zombie horde.”

Ash moved as if to slap him. Sam shifted his weight and glared, and Ash pitched a gob of intestine at Dean instead.

 

* * *

 

 

Ash let Sam orienteer them back toward the cars. GPS and compasses and digital maps were fine by him, but he preferred to focus his talents elsewhere, like earning an honest living, reviving clockwork as a relevant branch of mechanical engineering, and trying to keep his little girl from growing up hating him.

So, yeah, there were two reasons Ash Williams wanted out of the Adirondacks before nightfall. One was to get out of demon territory while the sun was on his side. The other was to drive to Kalamazoo in time to catch the kiddie production of Peter and the Wolf in the elementary school gymnasium the day after tomorrow.

They tromped unfamiliar hills, cutting a rifle-shot’s path over ridges and valleys in the shortest possible route to the cars. The broad maple leaves rustled overhead in a subtle breeze. Crows honked and hollered back and forth. Ash was no David Thoreau, but you don’t grow up union in Michigan without doing a few dozen buck hunts with your dad; there was a cloven-hoofed print of something three times too big for a white-tail in the soft earth near a sapling half-girdled by some critter’s itchy antlers; there was a tree split open by lightening and strangled in ropes of poison ivy; at the foot of a granite boulder, most of a turkey lay shrouded by a cloud of bluebottle flies. The sun has begun to slope, cutting sideways through his peripheral vision. He wondered where all the squirrels had gone.

He was trying not to see omens of gruesome death all around him, but the woods had other ideas.

“Huh,” Sam said, halting and staring down at the topographical map. Ash leaned in by his shoulder and looked down at the nest of squiggly lines.

Dean leaned in by his other shoulder and pointed out an area where the lines all started piling on top of each-other. “Shouldn’t we be hitting a steep ridge right about now?”

“We musta drifted East,” Sam muttered, tracing a region of wider-spaced lines, and seconds later, Dean echoed, “I think we’re in the Sea of Tranquility. Too far East.”

Freakish Siamese twins.

“If you can’t keep us on track, give me that thing,” Ash rumbled.

Sam raised a massive supercilious eyebrow and gripped the map tighter. Dean glanced between them, then scowled at Ash: lowered brows, tense shoulders, crazy eyes, the works.

Not much was known for certain about the Winchester brothers in the Hunting community, and Ash had missed most of it since he had better things to do than hang around biker bars with a bunch of drifters, dodging the law and fending off broken bottles and the odd vampire attack. But what stuck was that they would kill any monster they were pointed at, that there were rumors that the younger one was some kind of demon-spawn X-Man, and that the Hunters who had spread those rumors were either dead or much quieter lately.

“If we keep going South-West, we’ll hit the highway eventually,” Sam announced, like Ash couldn’t look at a red dot and a line and connect the two. He was not quite the most patronizing guy Ash had ever met, but he was up there. And his brother could apparently go from babes, booze, and rock ‘n’ roll party excellent to Ima cut you muthafucka in two point six seconds.

“Good,” Ash said, raising his palms peaceably. “You just keep your damn eyes on that map.” He swiped the compass out of Sam’s left hand. South southwest was the way to the cars. West southwest should be right into the lowering sun.

According to the compass, the sun was in the north-east.

“Aw, dammit,” Ash groaned. Understatement of the millennium.

“What?” Dean asked, squinting as though that would turn on the closed-captioning.

“It’s not pointing North!” Ash bellowed in his ear.

Dean traced out a system of X’s in the air with his hands, blinked, then reached up and slapped Sam upside the head. He pulled out his handy-dandy spirit activity detector, which flashed little green lights and screamed like a police siren at a rave.

Ash felt his left hand begin to tremble in a flood of adrenaline. The woods loomed close. Daylight was on his side, the ghost hunters weren’t about to be taken by the corruption and used to kill him, but in the woods . . .

The compass in his hand started to spin, whirling faster and faster, around and around until the needle on the hub made a reedy whine. Ash slapped it back to Sam, and whirled, scanning the shifting deepening shade, listening past the chaotic swirl of the shivering leaves. The wind picked up, whistling between branches and over hollow boles, acorn caps, bird bones, and the splintered shards of shattered boulders. The pitch warbled and wavered, almost, almost a waltz.

He remembered faltering through a waltz in a decaying cabin, two hands stumbling over the keys of an out-of-tune piano, as Linda laughed and smiled.

“I hear something,” Dean announced gruffly, gripping his satanic-looking stone axe.

“Like humming?” Sam asked, touching his own throat.

“Humming, yeah, like some kid’s humming—”

“Bon Jovi.”

“Leppard.”

Sam raised his eyebrows at Dean, then turned to Ash expectantly. Line comparing their auditory hallucinations would get them a second closer to leaving the woods.

“It’s coming,” Ash snarled, scanning the underbrush.

“Something’s coming?” Dean echoed, leaning too close to Ash’s face and yelling. “How do we kill it?”

Ash wondered if he’d ever been so goddamn naïve.

“You don’t,” Ash growled back.

Sam loomed over him, eager as a grammar nazi at an ESL essay contest. “Can you repel it? Does it react to salt, iron, grave dust? Do you know its culture of origin? I might have some protection symbols.”

The sun-dial shadows of the trees spun dizzily around them, the sun twirling impossibly, and Sam shut up before Ash had to punch him.

“What, you never see the sun do-se-do in the sky before?” The humming of the waltz grew closer, more in tune, more distinct, before it abruptly stopped. The wind stopped. The leaves stopped, frozen mid-rustle. Hairs prickled on the back of Ash’s neck, and in the distance, off to the north or east or whatever direction that was, he heard the boom of a large tree splitting in two.

Something was moving in the woods.

“Run,” Ash squeaked, his legs backing him away with the barest input from his brain. The Winchesters just stood there, Sam staring at him with skepticism and pity, and Dean watching his useless lug of a brother for translation. Ash forced himself to back-track and seized Dean by the jacket collar. “Fucking run!” he bellowed into his face.

Good deed done for the day, Ash scrammed like a cockroach under a spotlight.

Roots stretched up from the rough ground to trip him, low-hanging branches clawed at his face, the hill took a dive and Ash skidded down a slope through saplings and bracken, barely keeping himself upright. Behind him, he heard crashing footsteps, and behind those, the dynamite boom of great trees shattering.

Whoom. Whoom.

The dense woods broke open before him and the steely gleam of a still pond under a cloud-choked sky leapt at his feet. Ash skidded to a stop, boots just out of the water, and took off again along the open shoreline.

The glassy water roiled beside him, bubbles of stench and grease peeling up in the track of something long and flexible reaching just under the surface. Ash zagged back into the woods. Sam and Dean, having taken the straight line while he dog-legged around, rocketed past.

At the tail of the pack, now, Ash raced after the Winchesters’ speeding backs, his terror rising.

The thing in the woods was gaining on them. Ash felt its gaze prying at his spine, peeling at the cracks, peering, trailing, the implacable decerebrate attention of a thing beneath consciousness, older than minds.

Ash tripped, rolled, scrambled to his feet, and passed the Winchesters in a panicked sprint.

Leaves and vines whipped past. The weight of the gaze on his back eased slightly, but now he heard it, it was close, closing, he heard the howling, like the wind in an asylum, like screams in a mine. A tree cracked under its passage, and he heard the rustle of its crown as its halves fell.

He reached a clearing and the air reeked suddenly, of roadkill and musk and manure; across a pastel-painted meadow stood a big hairy bull moose, chewing its cud, and at the moose’s big sharp hooves lay a massive pile of meat and brown fur. The moose bent its head, and lifted up a corner of the carcass with its undershot fangs, revealing the blocky head of a brown bear. The moose shoot the carcass like a dog with a towel, tearing a chunk free, then stretched out a long gray tongue and rolled the meat in. It sniffed in his direction and pricked its ears at him.

Ash backpedalled out of there, nearly crashing into Sam as he and Dean caught up with him, and they all shot off again, running blindly into the woods. There was no direction; the sun swung back and forth, chasing the shadows under their feet; there was no navigation, no shelter, no aim, only running, running, until they dropped, as behind them, trees splintered and roared.

The white chapel broke the treeline before them and Ash swore furiously even as he took the stairs in a bound. Sam and Dean boomed inside fast enough that Ash didn’t even have to agonize over boarding them outside for the Evil to play with.

Ash slammed his back against the door and Sam joined him, an unshakeable man-mountain. Dean whipped out a sharpie and started drawing on the door—pentagrams, freaking _pentagrams_ , and something else with zig-zags and circles.

“Why doncha rub some butter on it,” Ash grunted.

The door jolted at his back, and he bit his tongue. He and Sam scrambled with their boots to keep their purchase on the floorboards.

“Any suggestions?” Sam hissed back.

“Seals of Neti, Mushdamma, and Ningishzida; draw ‘em in a triangle across the doors and windows.”

Beside him, Sam dug out his trusty I-Phone and pulled up a database of Sumerian gods and their iconography. “Creative,” he remarked, snipping three photos to sit side-by-side on the screen.  He waved Dean over and handed him the phone. Dean reproduced the threshold ward on the door over their heads. The thing outside slammed into it once more, and no more blows came.

Ash and Sam waited tense against the wood, both panting and trembling.

The sunlight in the windows swung sideways and winked out.

“What the hell,” Dean said.

They all blinked in the darkness. The flares they’d left in the cellar had gone out sometime during their aborted hike to the cars. Dean dug a small flashlight out of his pocket, located the LED lantern left on the floor by the unfortunate campers, and turned it back on. Cold white light splashed around the room, the pews carving out large bleak shadows until Dean lifted the lantern and carried it to the nearest windowsill.

“Okay,” Sam said, pushing himself slowly away from the door. “Did it actually warp space-time to make the sun set early, or is it just manipulating our perceptions?”

“Don’t know, don’t care,” Ash snapped. He stood, lurched across the room, and dragged two overturned pews past the lectern to lay over the trapdoor. “I’d say let the academics figure it out, but they got the self-preservation instinct of drunk turkeys. Just let’s make it through the night.”

“If it can make the sun set, can’t it keep it from rising?” Sam asked.

Ash had a small heart attack. “God, why would you _say_ that?”

“Dude,” Dean said from across the room where he was adding the seals of the Sumerian gods of masonry, dawn, and the gateway to the dead to all the windowsills, “do these things actually keep the creepy poltergeist thing out? ‘Cause you don’t look reassured.”

“Hey, I am calm and composed,” Ash retorted. “You two are the ones going up against Deadites happy as a pair of retarded baby bunnies.”

Dean cupped his hand to his ear and raised his eyebrows.

“Nooooooooo,” Ash said, which was close enough.

“Does it at least help?” Sam interrupted.

“The ward keeps the free spirits looking for bodies outside the building. It won’t do jack shit to anything with bones on.”

Dean looked at Sam, and Sam spread the fingers of one hand into a sieve, and demonstrated his fist being blocked but his fingers reaching through.

“Zombies are still in play?” Dean confirmed.

Sam rolled his eyes so hard Ash was surprised his head didn’t crack open.

“But seriously,” Dean said. “That tornado of bad vibes in the woods was herding us back here. Think we missed any?”

Ash spread his arms and spokesmodelled at the floorboards.

“What are we waiting for?”

Sam patted the air in front of him and then crossed his arms so that the splayed fingers of one hand rose slowly from behind his level forearm.

“Wait for dawn so we have an escape route,” Dean tried.

Sam nodded, and Dean unpacked the bag on his shoulders and unloaded a bottle of Mountain Dew and some gas station fruit pies.

“You guys win a lot of charades?” Ash asked Sam.

“We grew up in a _car,_ ” Sam sighed. “I got my first black eye in Punch Buggy.”


	3. Test of Allegiance

They settled in for a tense night. As an extra margin of safety between them and the floor, they bunked on some of the pews, dragged into a radiating arrangement so that someone was watching every square foot of the sanctuary, a maneuver Dean had termed the Defensive Ninja Star. The unused pews were stood on end against the walls or piled in front of the door, leaving the rest of the floor clear. The abandoned LED lamp perched at the center of the Ninja Star pews, casting long harsh shadows in its cold glow.

A green light from Ash’s bench joined it for a moment, the phosphor flare of a digital watch’s backlight. Sam heard Ash curse softly.

“Problem?” Sam asked.

“Not the monster-killing kind,” Ash grumbled, and swore again. On the other bench, Dean drummed his fingers to the beat of “Whole Lotta Love” and hummed tunelessly.

“Try me,” Sam said. There was a skeptical silence. “This life can get pretty rough.”

Ash shifted on the bench, and Sam waited, idly picking at the flakes of varnish driven from the surface of the pew by creeping mold.

“ _Peter And The Wolf_ plays tomorrow night in Kalamazoo,” Ash said after a long silence.

“The opera?” Sam asked cautiously.

“Don’t be an idiot, you think anybody’s gonna try to make a bunch o’ eight-year-olds sing arias? It’s a dance production. Selected numbers. I gotta get there for the little girls’ dance, the one with the elves.”

Sam’s eyes widened. “How—what—no, sorry.”

“Nah, it’s fine. Ash is no sensitive flower. Little girl’s Ruth. Cutest little tootsie-pop you ever saw, but I hear she’s got a mouth on her lately. Gonna be a real handful. Mom’s Sharon. And I didn’t see it at first, but these last couple years I got to wondering what Sharon ever saw in an asshole like me.

“We met at work. Promising start to a romance, let me tell you. I was a stock clerk, she was the pharmacist, and after the rest of the store fell in line and treated me like the only thing standing between them and getting shredded by Deadites—which I was, the place was a war zone for a good five years until I got the Book back under control—Sharon still hated my guts. Girls came and went—Cindy from Cosmetics, cute art major named Janeane, Marsha from Fish and Wildlife—but after it all fell apart for one reason or another, Sharon would still be there in her tight pant-suit, scowling at me like I was a spider on the bottom of a shoe.

“So you get this—I am your go-to guy for Deadites. Random shopper becomes one of the Evil Dead, I can put ‘em down with a couple hundred dollars’ damaged inventory max, and people can get on with their lives in another five minutes. But strung-out teens wandering in looking for oxycontin—not my strong suit.

“Sharon’s behind the counter when I spot the kid. She’s pushed the panic button ages ago, but he doesn’t know that. Kid’s a mess, stringy hair, zits, dirt, oversized surplus army coat like bums favor, and a real crazy lost look in his eye. He’s holding his gun sideways and his arm’s shaking, but you don’t need to be compos mentis to put a gigantic hole in a woman, and Sharon knows it. She’s still looking the little asshole right in the eye.

“Punk wants his oxy. But he doesn’t want her out of his sight for the five minutes it’ll take her to get it. The hamster wheel between his ears is spinning so hard you can smell the smoke, and sooner or later it’s gonna blow.

“So I come on the scene, and the rifles are across the store in Sporting Goods, and anyway, what’m I supposed to do, blow away some kid? But I gotta do something, or Sharon’s gonna get a hole in her.

“ I can’t say what it is I do then, heat of the moment and all, and the way Sharon tells it, I’d be cautious of, ‘cause that’s a load of sap that would never come out of my mouth. But by the time the cops get there, the kid’s sobbing into my neck getting his teenage funk all over me, the gun’s kicked under one of the shelves, and no shots were fired.

“That’s when Sharon and I started talking, you know, more than ‘Good morning, you crazy wench, is Stacy in yet?’ and ‘Try the loading dock, you misogynist pig, I’ve warned her about you.’ We’d eat TV dinners in the break room. I took her fishing. She took me bowling. We argued a lot. Turns out she’d minored in women’s studies. I can’t say all her impromptu sensitivity training sunk in, but it meant a lot more coming from somebody who’d actually lived that shit than from Mr. William G. Cristopherson the Third in HR.

“Before I knew it, I was done for. I was going to church for the first time since high school, Sharon’s church, even though I stuck out like an eggshell in brownie batter and had basically no rhythm. We got serious. We got hitched.

“Don’t see now what a woman like Sharon was doing with a guy like me. She worked herself through seven years of school. I changed majors three times on Dad’s dime before the cabin and the time travel fiasco, then never went back. I was in a frat, went drinking and bowling with guys I’d gone to high school with. Sharon had to buzz-cut her hair ‘cause she couldn’t find a goddamn stylist upstate. Her brother came to visit, and when they meet for drinks, he goes, ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume?’ And religion—she was serious. I know she knew I was just tagging along for her bazoonkas.

“Way I figured it, Sharon guessed from the stand-off with the junkie that if I could fight without using my gun, maybe I could think without using my dick. She was right. Problem is, I still do most of my fighting with my gun, and it wasn’t long until nature asserted itself and I ruined everything. I stayed in Dearborn next to the Thumb, and Sharon took our baby girl and got a sweet job across the Palm in Kalamazoo.

“My little tootsie pop’s growing like a weed. She danced all the time when she was knee-high, and I figure she still does, given the ballet recital.

“I don’t see her hardly enough. I missed too many meet-ups, ‘cause of the monster slaying gig, and I can’t have her stay over ‘cause of the power tools and again ‘cause of the monster slaying gig, and I can’t so much as look Sharon in the eye without us fighting like in the old days, but I can sit in a school gym and watch my little girl be a bluebird.

“Thing is, I kinda-sorta promised her I’d be there. And there’s only so many times you can let a kid down before they start hating you.”

Sam stared out across the blue-lit floor. “She doesn’t hate you.”

“Don’t fucking humor me, kid,” Ash snapped.

“I’m not. I mean, sure, she might resent the hell out of you. And maybe hate you a little. But still—”

“Always a second chance, huh?” said Ash sourly.

Sam sighed. “I wish.”

“What about you? You got any mysterious tragic romances?”

Sam cringed. Three brief loves ending in fire and bullets and knives—he’d finally gotten the message before the fourth casualty, he supposed. “There was a girl,” he said. “We broke it off. There were . . . risks, and priorities.”

“Well, goody for you,” Ash said. “I don’t know what’s worse, watching your flesh and blood move across the state, or being some kind of warrior-monk.”

Dean broke off his humming—he’d moved on to “Trampled Underfoot”—and yelled, “You ladies better not be talking about your feelings over there.”

“How does he do that?” Ash hissed.

“He’s smarter than he wants you to think.” Sam got an idea and texted Dean, and a few seconds later Dean snorted.

“You freaks passing notes?” Ash demanded, sitting up and glaring over the pews at them.

Dean sat up, too, grinning in the washed-out light. “Okay, Bruce Willis, you’re not, man. Wait, I can kinda see it—tough guy, fighting crime well into middle-age—”

Sam shook his head.

Dean frowned at him. “He telling you about car chases?”

Sam shook his head.

“You ever jump onto any moving helicopters?”

“If I had, I’d tell you,” Ash said, glancing at Sam in bafflement.

“Ever rescue a Christmas party from thieves pretending to be terrorists?”

“Hey, I am five digits up on John McClane,” Ash snapped. “I didn’t see Bruce Willis limping out of that broken glass scene minus a foot.”

Dean blinked at him over his most irritating grin. Ash snorted in frustration, waved his steel prosthesis in the air, and pointed at his boots. Sam held back a smirk. “Yeah, good luck putting field amputation in a Christmas movie,” Dean said.

Sam’s phone hummed, and a text from Dean, a row of question marks, popped up.

_No hints,_ Sam texted back.

Sam watched Dean’s face light up paler-white in the glow of his own phone. Dean’s mouth twitched, stifling a grin, and he scowled at Sam. “I hate this game. I hated it when you were ten; you’re not being clever, you’re being an annoying little shit. Okay, _massive dump_.”

Sam smiled serenely and reclined on his pew.

“Sam! Sam! Fucker. A guy can’t get some peace of mind when he goes deaf?”

“My god, you two are a pair of teenage girls!” Ash yelled.

“Sam, kick his ass if he called us names, I’m counting on you.”

Sam ignored him. Ash, foolishly, did not. “Shut up!”

“Got any catch-phrases?” Dean asked Ash. “Yippee-Ki-Yay Motherfucker? No?”

“Uuuuurgh!”

Dean shut up. But the rustling of the trees outside, the whistling of wind in the holes in the roof, and the quiet of the church itself were less oppressive, letting Sam wallow less in useless memory, letting him feel the air move over his cheek and not feel a soft caress, of a small hand or of a mind-shattering sun-flare whose bottomless contempt for humankind had come from the most intimate and invasive communion. Sam could lie in the quiet of the church, his brother at his back and their partner at his feet, watching the stark shadows and wracking his brain for which books he could access from his phone had anything on pre-Sumerian quasi-demons.

“Sam, floor’s moving,” Dean barked.

Startled, Sam sat up and grabbed his machete from where it rested on his shins; he saw Ash sitting up and reaching for a weapon, eyes wild and white-rimmed; Dean’s battle-axe glittered; from under the floor there came a boom and a scrape, a boom and a scrape, and then the floor folded under them. The pews tumbled and skidded into the cellar below.  Sam and his pew rolled in the fall; he landed hard on his back, kicked the pew aside, and stood with a winded gasp.

Straining splintered boards formed a shadowy cage around them, until a gnarled pair of water-rot hands reached between the gaps in front of Sam and tore a section free. Behind him, Dean’s 12-guage boomed. Sam hefted his machete and as the creature in the dark flung the floorboard aside, he lashed out into the gap and caught it in the throat. His blade jammed on the spine.

In the light of the lantern, on its side on the earthen floor, the creature’s pulpy lips peeled back in a grin, black blood glopping from its severed veins. Sam ripped his machete free and swung again. The corpse lifted a moldering forearm and blocked the blow. The blade bit bone. Sam yanked it back and swung a third time, slicing up in a swift arc, grounding his legs and letting power uncoil through his spine. The thing reached for him, and Sam took its arm above the elbow.

Ash’s saw roared to life and in the corner of his eye, Sam saw him raise it overhead two-handed. “Come get some!” he bellowed. As he brought it down, cold splatter sprayed the back of Sam’s neck.

Sam’s cold opponent stepped back, confused by the stump of its upper arm, and Sam pressed forward deeper into the cellar beyond the sagging floorboards, swung wide, and took the head off. In the seconds’ respite while the headless carcass staggered to orient itself, Sam ducked down and pawed among the upturned pews for his sawed-off. He found a barrel, a lever-action, Ash’s gun; he knelt, swung it at the corpse’s right knee, and blew it into shards.

“Nice shot, cowboy,” croaked a muffled voice at Sam’s ear. Sam looked up. There was a round dark blotch attached to one of the boards overhead; as he watched, it dropped, spinning. Instinctively Sam swung Ash’s gun at it; it lodged on the muzzle—a head, the head of the one-legged crawling carcass, with white eyes wide, the barrel caught in its broken teeth—

“Oh, fuck,” it gritted, and Sam fired. The head vanished in a pink mist. Sam sneezed rotten brains out of his nose.

Dean, at his back, had a corpse down and was jointing it apart, sawing with mechanical efficiency with his strange new weapon. Ash had one boot on a torso—“How’s that taste, bitches?”—and there didn’t seem to be much left of whatever he’d been fighting. Sam looked at his own Deadite, which was army-crawling in his direction on its stumps and limbs, and felt like a slacker.

Apparently his year as a civilian had left him more out of shape than he’d thought.

He shot the corpse’s remaining hand off, not wanting to deal with any crawling, grasping things. He swung low, parting the good arm just below the shoulder and clipping the machete tip on a rock in the ground; on the remaining knee, he cut the tendons. The torso rolled back and forth, seal-crawling and scissoring with the stumps of its femurs. Sam leaned down and drove his machete into the base of its spine, but it kept struggling, trying to stab him with the sharp bones of its upper arms.

Right. Decapitation hadn’t fazed the thing.

He set his boot on the torso’s pelvis, stabbed his blunted machete down by the hip joint, and yanked up on the femur. Something crunched. Sam scowled down at the still-struggling carcass.

Ash pivoted toward him, hefting his idling saw and grinning sardonically. “Need some horsepower, there, bud?” he asked, as Dean, axe in hand, remarked, “Getting soft, little brother.”

Sam huffed, stabbed his machete down again. “Not like he’s going anywhere.” With the three corpses here, the one from the afternoon, and Linus in the mental health facility, they’d accounted for the entire camping group. He bent, caught the second leg, and hauled on it, waiting for a crack and a give.

“Sam!” Dean lunged forward, leaping an overturned pew as Sam felt a sharp tug on the back of his belt. Something yanked him back ward, deeper into the dark of the ruined cellar; Sam clung white-knuckled to his machete as he ripped it free from the corpse. He spun and swung wildly, lodging his blade between the knuckles of a slime-slick talon. The scent was close, the odor was strangling, caustic macerated flesh and sulfur. A half-dozen hands caught his weapon arm, his knees, his waist, his ankles—a rat-king of a half-dozen victims hidden in the dark earth for decades clutched him close and fast; a gray tongue slurped at his ears and behind broken teeth and fissured lips gabbled “Swallow your soul—swallow your soul—” in insensate, horrible chant.

Dean’s battle-axe whistled, wind catching in the gap between bone and stone and sinew; Ash’s saw screamed. Sam’s right arm was suddenly free to move, though the hand on his wrist still clutched tight enough to stop the blood; the leering face nuzzling his throat slipped severed from its neck, splattering Sam in foul black ichor, but before the head fell, the body bucked like a soccer player heading a ball and the jaws gaped wide.

Sam growled as its teeth sunk deep into the meat of his neck.

Someone pried the muzzle of a shotgun between Sam’s chest and one of the corpse’s shoulders, and fired, freeing Sam’s upper body even as the flash and spreading pellets left a hot welt through his jacket; the axe whistled again and Sam’s knees were free; with a panic-fueled strike of Sam’s own, the carcass lost another arm and Sam staggered away; at last the three of them stood together and carved and fired until the fused monstrosity moved no more.

“Thwallow your thoul, thwallow your thoul,” mumbled the head.

“Shit, Sam!” Dean yelled, brushing Sam’s hair back from the rotting weight locked in the side of his throat.

Behind Dean, Ash lowered his saw and raised his steel hand grimly. “You gonna cooperate, or you gonna turn a shitstorm into a hurricane?”

“Wait,” Sam said, as Dean tugged uselessly at the still-animated gripping jaws. “Make it look like self-defense or Dean’s gonna kill you.”

 

* * *

 

 

Once upon a time, there was a vampire specialist named Gordon Walker. He had the usual sob story—sister gets turned, puts sister out of her misery, attempts to wipe out the species that did it to her—and he was more than usually good at what he did. He tracked down vampires before the exsanguinated corpses turned up, stamped out problems before they happened. He was one of the main reasons that, until about five years ago, most Hunters thought vampires were extinct.

Walker’s proactive approach meant that when rumors started spinning that little Sammy Winchester might not be exactly human, might, in fact, be some kind of human-demon hybrid created as an infiltration agent or a fore-runner of the Apocalypse, Walker was one of the first Hunters to try to take Sam out. He failed, and wound up in jail for decapitating a bunch of missing persons who’d technically been dead for years or centuries, for possession of illegal weapons, and for being a scary black dude.

Walker soon broke out of prison, most likely to try for Sam Winchester again. No one ever heard from him since, and the vampire population exploded.

Ash didn’t much feel like ending up like Gordon Walker.

He watched as Dean led Sam over to the fallen pews, flipped one back upright, sat Sam down, and set the lantern up. Dean set to work freeing the Deadite head from Sam’s shoulder, carving the jaw muscles off, setting two thick splinters of floorboard between its molars, and prying it loose. It started babbling about souls as it rolled around on the ground, and as Dean poured holy water from a hip flask into Sam’s bite, Ash shut the head up with a blast of buckshot because he was considerate like that.

Dean spun at the retort of the sawed-off and gave Ash a thumbs up. Some hearing left, but not enough to take care of himself in Deadite-infested woods.

Self-defense. Sure. “Any hints?” Ash hissed at Sam, whose damp and bleeding neck steamed unsettlingly. “Cause I’m not play-wrestling with your Deadite ass. Good way to lose my other hand.”

Sam bit his lip and wrinkled his forehead. Jeez, he was like a little kid in the body of an anthropologist-slash-pro-wrestler.

“Are you two talking about taking Sam out?” Dean growled, spinning away from the blackening tooth-marks on Sam’s neck. Ash shook his head innocently. It’d never worked yet, but there was always a first. “I’m on to you,” Dean growled at Sam. He turned and pointed a threatening finger at Ash. “If you touch him, it’s the last thing you fucking do, I don’t care if he’s white-eyed and drooling black slime as he chews through your throat. He’s _my_ goddamn brother.”

“Looks like you’re getting the Old Yeller treatment,” Ash told Sam.

Sam screwed his eyes shut. “Shit. Oh shit.” His voice shook. “This’ll kill him.” He snatched Dean’s sleeve and pulled until Dean turned to face him. “Do it now, Dean, don’t wait—” he cut himself off, pointed at a pile of twitching quartered limbs on the floor, shook his head vigorously, and mimed shooting himself in the temple.

Ash realized that Garth had been half-right about the Winchesters. Sam, at least, was an ideal partner on a zombie hunt.

Sam twitched his head abruptly, a clumsy, purposeless motion. His eyes widened and he wheezed. Ash took aim. Dean stepped into Ash’s shot and clapped his hands to Sam’s shoulders as Sam’s body slumped down on the pew and his blackening neck twisted and swayed, slowly at first, then violently. His mouth worked, voiceless.

“Fuck that,” Dean snarled into his face. “No. Sam, you’re gonna beat this.” His rough voice deepened to fanatical intensity. “You beat the Devil. You beat Famine, ‘cause I mark that as a win. You beat losing your everloving mind—dude, you want me to believe in you? I do. I promise I do. You’re gonna keep this under wraps until dawn. Sunlight and the power of love, okay, man?”

“Doesn’t do jack for bite wounds,” Ash said. But Sam wasn’t listening. Sam sprawled there, Dean crouching over him right in biting range. Arms and legs shaking, Sam curled into a ball and clutched at his hair as though trying to physically pin his head still.

The dark of the cellar yawned behind the slanting boards of the ruined floor; there were un-exploded Deadite chunks littering the ground, and Ash’s back-up was lost in their own little suicidal world. Screw ‘em.

Except they were all just waiting out the night so they could try for the cars again, praying the Thing in the woods got bored. Ash was stuck sharing the partial shelter of the chapel with them and their stupidity.

The black veins in Sam’s neck receded toward the bite for an instant, and Sam shook his head deliberately. He gasped for air again, a drop of blood trickling from his nose, and pulled out his cell phone to compose a text one-handed. He held it out to Dean, who froze and stared at his brother.

“You don’t need that,” Dean protested.

Sam clutched his head in his hands as though to steady himself, then mimed shooting himself in the temple again.

“No,” Dean said. “No! You don’t learn, do you? You still think you’re not ‘strong enough?’”

Sam mimed snapping a stick between his hands.

“Sam—” Dean growled.

“For god’s sake, lemme tie him up before he bites your throat out,” Ash interrupted.

“What?” Dean said.

Ash dug a packet of zip ties out of his duffel bag and threw them at him. Sam, who had at least the common sense of the average turkey, held his shaking hands behind his back. Dean zipped Sam’s wrists and ankles together, and laid him down on a clean stretch of earth. Ash scanned the basement, then leaned over and looked at Sam’s cell phone, abandoned on the bench.

_Hair of the dog._ Huh.

Sam lay sideways, the black veins resurging into his neck as his eyes rolled, wide, panicked, human. Dean poured more holy water on the wound and blisters rose from the surrounding skin. He rattled off a Latin exorcism, each word sharp and forceful like a good punch. Sam kept shuddering, fighting against the corruption invading his body, silent lips working, working.

If he was threatening to swallow their souls, Ash was going to blast him, then take his chances with Dean’s vengeance. But he wasn’t, Ash heard, as Sam gasped and got a hold of his voice again. Dean’s exorcism was finished, and Sam was still battling his own neck muscles for air.

“What’s he saying?” Dean asked.

Ash pointed to the phone on the bench.

“Right. He wouldn’t kid about this. Watch him for me.”

“I don’t babysit Deadites,” Ash retorted, shaking his head.

“Two minutes. He dies, you die.” Dean snagged one of the shotguns and disappeared into the dark behind the fallen boards.

Ash glared down at Sam. “I take two good old boys on a hunt and I still end up with a damsel in distress. Well, listen up—I’m not dying for you. I got things to do, people to see. You newbies are not my problem.”

Sam wheezed as the black rot surged around his throat. Ash swallowed in sympathy. Strangled to death from within—nasty way to go.

Dean returned, wiping his hands on his jeans and holding an open bag of M&Ms gingerly between his thumb and forefinger. He nodded at Ash, then knelt at Sam’s face. “This better work—the country doesn’t have enough dumpsters for you to dive to pay me back for what I had to do to get this.” Then he put his hand on Sam’s chin—Sam’s neck seemed to be trying to make Sam bite him, but Sam’s teeth didn’t look to be getting with the program—and poured black sludge the exact color and texture of Deadite blood into the corner of Sam’s mouth.

Hair of the dog that bit him. Okay.

There were a few things wrong with this picture. One was that Ash had gotten Deadite blood in his mouth a couple hundred times, spatter and splash, and it had never done anything he’d noticed. Another was that Sam Winchester was apparently a vampire whose brother had been helping him masquerade as a hunter for years, killing all who might very rightly try to put him down. The last was that Deadite blood was the nastiest substance short of diaper juice that Ash had ever tasted, and Sam was sucking it down like a dying man at a desert spring or an alkie jumping off the wagon.

Sam swallowed, frowned, and held very still for a minute. The black veins receded from his face and throat, fading just into the very margins of the bite, and there they stayed.

“Need more?” Dean asked. Sam shook his head.

Ash was a tolerant guy. He was cool with black magic—when all you have is a Necronomicon, you end up commanding a lot of demons to stop them from killing you. He was cool with the proactive hunting approach. He was cool with giving monsters the benefit of the doubt. Cool with Ford, cool with Chevy, just an all-around reasonable and tolerant person. But he was not an idiot.

When Dean drew his belt knife and reached for the zip ties at Sam’s back, Ash put his sawed off’s muzzle in his face.

Dean slowly eased the knife away, and Ash nodded and lowered the gun. “No offense, Sam, but these things lie like rugs.”

“We gotta run, these things’re coming off,” Dean announced.

Ash gave Dean a thumbs up.

“Guys, come on,” Sam croaked.

Dean picked up another shotgun, sat on the pew behind Sam, and settled in, staring out into the cellar’s dark.

“If you drink their blood, do you turn into one of them?” Ash asked.

“I can control them,” Sam said hesitantly, which was not the same as a no.

“Sam, you good?” Dean interrupted. Sam nodded.

“Nosy bastard,” Ash griped. “Did you just exorcise yourself with your Antichrist powers?”

 “It’s a little more complicated than that—”

“Is it gone or is it hiding?” Ash demanded, cutting to the chase.

Sam swallowed. “It’s under control.”

Ash was a reasonable, tolerant guy. But he hated to shoot people while they were looking at him with human faces, no matter how many times he’d had to. “Stay awake. Or it’ll get into your head and you’ll wake up one of them.”

 

* * *

 

 

Deadite blood was . . . different.

Taking demon blood from Dean’s hands was shame and perversity and absolution all in one; the blood had always been about leaving Dean behind, about becoming something distant and powerful when being Sam Winchester, human, wasn’t enough.

Demon blood was like testosterone and amphetamines on a twenty-four hour slow burn. It was fresh from the living host and tangy with cordite.

Deadite blood was more like marijuana.

Awareness of the creeping tendrils of diabolical intelligence infecting his flesh had filled him, as he swallowed the dose, even as a disjointed contentment washed over him. Sam had visualized the possession and squeezed it backward, out of his undamaged neck and back into the wound. He’d relaxed. He no longer felt like he was controlling his hands and feet from a mile away through a hurricane, he could breathe, he could speak. But no matter how hard he pushed, he couldn’t drive the black stain out of the stinging bruise of the bite.

Sam was strangely okay with that. He supposed he could ask Dean to carve the bite out, but . . .

. . . that seemed like an over-reaction, somehow.

He’d worry about that in the morning.

 

* * *

 

 

They settled into a new configuration, with Sam on the ground at Dean’s feet like an injured mastiff, Dean staring into the dark clutching a shotgun and humming to himself, and Ash prowling around, carving floorboards out of the way to give them an unobstructed view of the cellar, carving the downed Deadites into smaller chunks, and when all that could be sawed apart was sawn, dragging another pew around so he could sit facing Dean and Sam across the lantern. Ash stared at the shadows and listened to the torsos gurgling in the far corner of the cellar and to Dean’s warble: “Baby—baby—baby—babe, I’m gonna leave you.”

Ash was a little impressed that Sam hadn’t murdered Dean years ago.

“Lazy deaf bastard,” Ash groused.

“Hey, man, thanks for cleaning house,” Dean said at the same time.

Sam snickered.

Ash eyed Sam suspiciously. A grade-school sense of humor was a hallmark of Candarian demon possession.

Sam wasn’t defying the laws of physics or the bounds of human anatomy at the moment; he’d managed to flop over onto his side to lie awkwardly on one of his arms, knees bent and ankles cinched tight to his wrists. He looked a little stoned, more than anything. The bite on his neck was still dead gray. Eyes still looked like they were screwed in right, if a little lazy.

They listened as Dean segued into “Hot Blooded,” slapping his palms against the pew. Dean poked Sam with his boot and Sam smiled thinly up at him.

Ash shifted his butt on the hard bench.

“You got a lot of experience with possession by these demons?” Sam asked, noticing Ash watching him.

“Been there, done that, burned the T-shirt,” Ash replied. “Saw a lot of hunters and civvies go down, usually after they died, but if they were unlucky it’d get into ‘em while they were alive. It got into me a couple times; first time the dawn burned it out, second time I snapped myself out of it—for all I know, that particular move is an Ash Williams special.” He frowned at Dean, who frowned back, then stuck his tongue out at him. “Sounds like you’ve been around the block a bit yourself; is auto-exorcism a regular thing for you?”

“I wish,” Sam grumbled. “I’m the village bicycle.”

Touchy! “They wanted a piece of _me_ so bad they made copies,” Ash said.

“What, like golems? Aliens made you do it?”

“Budding.”

“Ew.”

“Most satisfying thing—one of the most satisfying things I ever did was blow my evil twin out of the air with a fifty-pound sack of gunpowder. ‘Course it was white powder—stuck in the armpit of the Middle Ages, you’re left with the fundamentals, and I woulda given a million bucks and my good arc welder for some thermite—but anyway, there’s something about making fertilizer bombs out of actual birdshit that really makes you feel like a man, you know? Freshman chemistry and some American grit—I coulda blown up the world. Coulda built some cannons and conquered the whole place. Changed history.”

“History doesn’t change,” Sam replied, like he had some kind of bubble-bursting reflex. “Closed loop. You always went there, and you always came back.”

“Well maybe I go back again. Make a fat living as the new wise man.”

“Do you want to?”

Ash had to stop talking about this stuff around people who actually took him seriously. Speaking of—“You do a lot of century-hopping?”

“Mostly decades. Mostly just Dean,” Sam said. “Dean’s been everywhere.”

“Bangkok?”

“Scotland. Wild West, Prohibition, the ‘70s . . . all the afterlifes . . . he just disappears and when he comes back, he’s different, I don’t know what makes him tick anymore. He used to rag on me for going to school, but Dean—he’s so smart, and he runs off and comes back with like a master’s or a black-belt or whatever it is they have there. You saw how he took apart those Deadites. And he just—” Sam looked up at Ash with bit wet defeated-looking eyes, and Ash cleared his throat and watched the shadows. “He pretends it’s not even there, like I’m just his stupid kid brother who’d never catch up to him.”

“You need some friends your own age.”

“You know Dean got himself apprenticed?” Sam spat, ignoring him. “He spends ten years in training—and then he comes back and he doesn’t say a word. And he—ten years! It’s part of who he is! And he barely talks. It’s like he’s got a whole secret life—”

“For cripes’ sake, is he your brother or your wife?”

“You try living within twenty feet of a guy for twenty years and see how you feel.”

Dean cleared his throat. “Sam, I smell estrogen.”

Freaking spooky. Sam collapsed on his down arm, which had to be numb by now, and glared up at the ceiling. Ash waited for Dean’s off-key foghorn singing to start up again, but he stayed quiet. Eventually Sam began to hum, still tuneless, but without the excuse of being deaf.

Wasn’t the finest of musical endeavors, but after thirty years you could still get a good drunken chorus going with “Wanted Dead or Alive.” Ash caught himself swaying along, until Dean blundered in with something vaguely recognizeable as “Nothing Else Matters.”

“The rumor mill never said you two were this goddamn annoying,” Ash griped.

“More like how I’m some kind of half-demon and Dean’s a revenant,” Sam said.

“Hey, I live and let live. Unless you’re after my soul, then it’s live and let die. We got enough slavering hellbeasts to kill without worrying about the ones you’d meet over a beer.”

“Sound like Dean, not killing anything that doesn’t deserve it.”

“Just don’t wanna make life harder for myself.”

Sam rolled back onto his side and smiled tiredly. “You ever hear about the time I killed Dean’s sensei?”

“You’re . . . not the live and let live type,” Ash said, reaching half-consciously for his shotgun. Dean, snake-quick, raised his own. Not aiming at Ash yet, but ready to blast his head off in case he aimed at Sam. Goddamnit.

“I pinned him to the wall and lit him on fire from the inside with my mind,” said Sam solemnly. “He made Dean different. I had to get rid of him.”

Ash froze, staring at the brothers: Dean, the joker and sharp-shooter; Sam, the straight man with the infinite occult symbols database on his phone; both of them so goddamn functional and totally psychotic. He was screwed. The rumors were right. Garth could go shove his contacts book up his ass.

Sam laughed suddenly, long and loud and obnoxious.

“Yeah, you really had me going, there,” Ash drawled.

“He was a demon,” Sam snickered. “He trained Dean in Hell, he totally had it coming. Dude, you should see your face!”

“Deadite humor always rubs me the wrong way,” Ash said, and Sam’s eyes sparked yellow.

“Close, man. Close.”

“How about those rumors about your brother being the only one allowed to put you down?”

“I woudn’t bet much on Dean’s loyalty to humanity lately,” Evil Sam said. “And he’s not gonna know, ‘cause you’re not gonna tell him. You’re a coward, Ash, and you’ve got something to lose.”

Ash laughed, the crazy laugh that caught in his throat. “You uglies keep talking like you know me inside and out. I’m gonna join you. I’m nothing but a goody-two-shoes. I’m a full-time guardian of that Book. Now I’m a coward. You just keep missing the obvious.”

Evil Sam narrowed his flat yellow eyes.

Ash raised his shotgun, aimed somewhere over Dean’s shoulder, and widened his eyes. “Maybe I’m just dumb!” He fired.

Dean swallowed the hook and spun on the pew, his own gun rising. Ash racked in another shell and took aim at Sam’s face; Sam flinched, Ash pulled the trigger, and then Ash found the ground dropping away under his feet as the boards overhead stabbed down at him. Spent buckshot peppered the dirt behind Sam’s head. Ash struck the bottom of the chapel floor, caught a joist to the spine and a splintered plank to the ass. He was being crushed like a mouse in a centrifuge. He struggled, but he could barely drag his limbs from side to side; the floor groaned at the unaccustomed lift.

Dean had spun back around at the retort of Ash’s second blast and took in the situation. “Sam,” he croaked, sounding like he was about to either pound something into a pulp or cry.

Sam glared up at Ash, new eyes glowing. “Asshole! Look what you made me do!”

“You started it,” Ash grunted. His right hand was locked around his shotgun stock, small mercy, but the force of Sam’s antigrav was making the socket slip around his stump. It was either lose the hand and the gun, or drop the gun, and Ash gave a titanic wrench that pulled something important in his shoulder, gave up, and dropped the gun, which fell down instead of punching through the chapel ceiling.

Dean caught it out of the air. Then he laid both weapons on the pew.

“You goddamn lemming!” Ash bellowed.

Dean raised his palms. “Look, Sam,” he said. “We’re cool. Guns are put away, nobody’s killing anybody. So just—”

“I need my arms free if we’re gonna argue about this,” Sam grumbled, and Ash heard the slick pops of joints dislocating. Sam shimmied his suddenly-narrowed palms out of the zip ties, reached out—more snaps as his thumbs realigned—and caught his machete as it flew to his hand. He hacked his ankles free and stood.

“Sam, I know you can fight this,” Dean pled. An imaginary quartet of violins began to wail in the background.

“I thought you said we were cool.” Sam made a peace sign and a skeptical face.

“Shut up. Sammy, I know you’re in there—”

“Dean—” Sam slapped his forehead with his palms in frustration. “What, do you think me and some possessing spirit are facing off in here, like on _Wormhole Extreme_? I’m Sam. Just with a little . . . Mentos in my Diet Coke.”

“ _Christo_ ,” Dean barked.

It must have been some blasphemous demon-hunter power word, because Evil Sam flinched. “Okay, demonic Mentos,” he muttered.

Dean caught Ash’s eyes. Ash had no clue what he was getting at, until Dean began the Winchester Bro.s Nation’s Shortest Latin Exorcism for Common Demonic Possession™. Or as Ash would later recall, an Ewok slinging rocks at an Imperial Walker.

“Ow,” Sam cringed again. He gestured for time-out. “That hurts.” He tilted his head aside and pulled his collar away from the bite on his neck, and Ash got a great view of the half-moon cuts rimmed close with black; it wasn’t spreading.

“ _Demon of Candar, obey me!”_ Ash snapped in Sumerian.

Sam froze, shook himself, and blinked up at him. “Your pronunciation sucks. But nice try.”

“ _Christo,_ ” Ash said, and grinned at Sam’s flinch, even as the force crushing him to the ceiling doubled.

“Sam, you set him on fire and you’ll never be able to live with yourself,” Dean growled. “Fight it!”

Ash goggled at him. “Don’t give him any ideas!”

Dean began chanting again, more Latin, more _In nomine dei_ ’s and _spiritu sanctu_ ’s, a churchier, unabridged exorcism, as he approached Sam slowly, suicidally, stepping into the gap between the pews where the lamp and the duffel bags and the blades lay. Sam took his cell phone out of his pocket and started composing one monster of a text message.

Goddamn moron. Being deaf was a bullet-proof excuse to refuse to hear reason. Lucky Ash had a back-up. “ _Demon of Candar, remove your mask!_ ”

A scent of Deadite and hot springs filled the cellar. In the blue of the lantern, it was hard to see the tell-tale corpse-gray of Deadite skin, but the blunt black claws, the warped and gnarled joints, and the craggy caricature of Sam’s usual face shone startling. Wide, mad eyes under a heavy brow; bruised eyelids; black gums around bared teeth. Sam turned his face toward Ash. “I liked that skin,” he growled, his voice hoarse and rumbling.

Dean stumbled backward and grabbed up his freaky bone and stone axe, as his exorcism sputtered and faded.

“Oh, crap,” Sam said, putting his phone away and turning from Ash to Dean. He stretched out a hand and sent the axe rattling into the dark with his unholy telekinesis. As Sam advanced on him, Dean stared him down, and began to recite something that was not Latin, something old and clipped and clumsy, awkward and ugly to human ears as though its poetry could only be perceived by something free from flesh. “Stop that. I’m not kidding,” Sam said, and tackled Dean.

They grappled for a few seconds. Dean had moves, but so did Sam, and Sam had forty pounds and the powers of Hell on his side. It ended with Dean on his back and Sam crouched over his chest, twisted white face grim and sulfurous eyes glowing, his brutal clawed hands making grooves in Dean’s throat. Ash wriggled on the ceiling as Dean clawed at Sam’s arms and kicked his legs; his face turned red and his struggles weakened until he began to tremble with oncoming death. Just before he stilled, Sam released him and stood.

Dean gasped, long and ragged.

Ash crashed to the floor and landed on a pile of shattered lumber.

“Take care of Dean and I’ll make you a Legion captain or something,” Sam told Ash. “If he dies, I’ll devour your soul piece by piece over a thousand years.” Then he walked under the gap in the floor, jumped fourteen feet straight up, and clomped over the boards and out of the chapel.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ooowee, wasn't that exciting.
> 
> But the question I am anticipating is, where did Sharon come from? In creating Sharon, I committed the feminist mortal sin of designing a woman's character and background around the man whose love interest she is. When Ash returns from the Middle Ages, he's concealing his PTSD and grief with a Marty-Stu parody playboy persona. Like all good Marty-Stus, his mourning leaves him emotionally unavailable. Cindy in Cosmetics is a buxom blonde vixen whose bedroom talent gives him a moment of respite from his grief for Linda. Marsha from Fish and Wildlife knows how to have a good time and they can talk about guns for hours, but he can never bare his heart to her like he could with Linda. Janeane's manic pixie antics are adorable, but they grate on him when he thinks of Linda. Any woman who catches his eye is mortal imperfection compared to Linda.
> 
> Sharon is not a reflection of myself. I have no African ancestry and did not grow up in any predominantly African-American neighborhoods. Sharon is intensely driven and pragmatic, qualities Ash lacks and that eventually set her on more stable emotional and economic footing than him. Everything she has, which is considerable in this economy, she has worked hard for, and she takes nothing for granted.
> 
> Sharon does not immediately catch Ash's eye as a potential love interest, because she is African-American and Ash is as deep as a small puddle. Her race disrupts Ash's script for meeting women, so he eventually sees her as a person in her own right rather than a pale substitute for the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Linda. They have a rom-com romance, and then, BAM! Here come Rokhal's dad issues!
> 
> Many fans of Supernatural have dad issues, and I am no exception. But the fictional focus of my dad issues is not John Winchester. He had reasons for the stupid things he did. If anything, I identify with John Winchester. The fictional focus of my dad issues is Ash Williams, because he and my dad are narcissistic asses who put people at risk for no good reason whatsoever. Therefore Ash is punished with divorce angst and a crisis of confidence, thanks to Sharon.


	4. Random NPC Monsters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Dean reveals that he is a giant nerd.

Ash let himself moan a little moan. Then he took stock of his limbs—as functional as usual—pondered whether he might be bleeding internally—probably not very fast—and pried himself to his feet.

Dean was curled on his side, wheezing.

“Hate to break it to you,” Ash said, “but your brother is a brat.” He grabbed his shotgun, slid it into the sheath at his back, and felt better. Then he grabbed his chainsaw, slid it into the other sheath at his back, and felt a lot better. Dean was rolling to his feet; Ash grabbed the lamp and a stick and scrawled in the dirt where he could read.

_got spell to go somewhere safer_

“Where safer?” Dean rasped.

_????_

“Spin the wheel? No, thanks. ‘Sides, we gotta stop Sam.”

Ash growled in frustration. _Deadite._ He underlined it twice, then pointed to the word _safer_.

“Trying to get rid of me? You toss me down some rabbit hole and I got friends’ll have words with you.” Dean swayed a moment, then clumped off to retrieve his axe and re-pack the duffel bags. “Including Sam.”

Ash seriously contemplated feeding him to his brother. He clasped his hands under his chin in a lovesick maiden pose, then slapped Dean upside the head with his left hand. Which proved to be a bad idea when Dean ducked and punched him in the throat.

“That’s still Sammy out there,” Dean growled. “He’s high as balls on Deadite blood, and he’s about to go do something stupid. If he wanted us dead, we’d be dead, and no way I’m letting you Hunt him.”

Ash made crazy spirals around his ear as he wheezed.

“He told me,” Dean said, pointing to the reddening fingerprints on his own throat. “We have a secret code.”

“Good god, you people are batshit,” Ash snarled. “We go after him, we do this my way, we do this smart,” he continued, scratching the word _Necronomicon_ on the ground. “That may be your brother’s hardware, but it’s a Deadite where it counts, and Deadites want two things: to terrorize, torture, subjugate, mutilate, and swallow the souls of the human race, and to get that Book so they can do it on a global scale. Key point, bucko—the Book’s hidden, and I’m the one who hid it. Sam’s coming back. And he’ll want a piece of me.”

Dean blinked at him. “ _Necronomicon_ ’s got spells to lock Sam down and get it out of him?”

Ash gave him a withering glare. He pointed from the word to his temple, picked up a rock to stand for himself, and set it on the ground. Then he mimed Sam being all Eviled up and crazy and strangling people, and pointed at his left hand. He walked his left fingers over the ground toward the rock, then swatted them down with his steel right.

“Oh, you’re bait,” Dean said.

Close enough. “We get up to the roof, sling some ropes, barricade the doors and windows, get us the high ground and space to retreat. You call in the Chief Ugly and later you can look back on the good times you had with your kid brother before he went Evil. And find a goddamn shrink.”

Something beeped. Ash whirled around and saw Dean raising his phone to his ear, the screen glowing. “Hey, Geek Boy. Get your ass back here. Looks like Ash has a copy of that book you never knew you wanted, the _Nine Gates_ , no, wait the _Nec_ —”

Ash snatched the phone out of Dean’s hand, fumbled for the off button, gave up, and threw it across the basement. “You stupid bastard!” he bellowed into Dean’s face.

“Listen, when Sam gets here, I’m gonna try to finish that exorcism that set him off before, and things could get hairy. You want to run, you run. Don’t wait up.”

“Run where, you fucking amateur?” Ash snarled. Goddamn ghost hunters!

“Suit yourself,” Dean replied. He picked his way through the dark and retrieved his phone. It buzzed in his hand. Dean fiddled with the screen, raised his eyebrows at it, and grabbed a hefty piece of board off the dirt. “Sammy says heads up.”

Ash unsheathed his chainsaw and watched the ground underfoot sharply.

 From above, outside the chapel, slipped the creaking and rustling of trees in the wind; from the nave was silence, from the cellar was nothing but Ash and Dean’s steady breathing. The wind picked up, an unholy whistle crying from the eaves, and Ash tightened his grip on the saw’s handles.

With a crunch and a spray of glass, the church collapsed above them and the roof opened onto starless black. Trees hissed overhead, close, close, inside the shuddering wreck of the walls—maple limbs pounded like the arms of an angry chimp, tore beams away like a bear shredding a beehive, probed like gray aliens with an abductee quota. More branches clawed at the hole in the floor, reaching down blindly, feeling for them.

“Run!” Ash yelled uselessly, then he grabbed Dean by the arm and pointed to a brand new hole in the floor overhead that the tree didn’t seem to be interested in; boards sloped and dangled crazily near the corner of the chapel. Green leaves of invading boughs cast jagged shadows like flames. Ash sheathed the saw, pushed himself up onto a sloping section of floor as he kicked off the nearby cellar wall, and seal-flopped up the worn boards. Something pushed at his feet and he lashed out reflexively. “It’s me,” Dean grunted below him.

Hunting partner. Right.

Once Ash cleared the slope, Dean boosted himself up the same way, making the collapsing floor flex. Feet behind him, the tree pawed blindly on, tearing at the floor and making the joists underfoot creak and sway. Ash watched Dean wriggle up the boards, chewed on his lip, and finally stripped off his belt for him to grab hold of. In seconds, they were both up and out. The tree plunged its limbs down beside them, still plumbing the original gap, close enough to trip on. Hardwood branches rubbed together impatiently until the bark flaked. A few scraped the floor and flew across the church to boom against what remained of the walls.

Ash grabbed Dean by the coat collar and towed him toward a spot of deeper blackness and relative silence. They stumbled over warping boards, skidded on broken glass, and barked their shins against the last two feet that remained of the nearest wall. “Hoaurrrgh!” snarled Ash, and Dean barked, “Sonofabitch!”

The mutter of the leaves paused, and then branches snapped as the tree squeezed its crown back out of the basement and straightened. Something reached for them—Ash swung the saw out, fired it up, and cut a wild arc through springy twigs and thick branches.

“Jump! Jump!” Ash yelled, shoving Dean, and they took a leap of faith off the remains of the wall into the black below. They hit soft smooth dirt and trampled weeds, Dean tucking and rolling, Ash skidding on his feet, running saw high overhead.

“Leave the Ent! Run!” Dean bellowed, bulling into him and tugging him into the black woods.

The tree ignored them and raked its boughs through the ruins of the chapel. Ash sheathed the saw and followed Dean.

 

* * *

 

 

With enough practice, even humans could see in the dark.

Dean kept his eyes wide as he crashed through the underbrush. Clouds covered the stars, but a haze of moonlight seeped through, marking patches of gray in the crawling black canopy. Shrubs scraped at his jeans and whipped across his face. Tree trunks gloomed in the edges of his vision, a swift dodge from impact. A hand clutched him on his shoulder, a steady partner watching his tail, serving as his ears.

Dean could run a straight line in wooded country for twenty minutes without re-orienting. He was good; with his axe and his two legs, he could carve out a moment of safety in any ambush, as many moments as it took to reach his destination.

So where to?

The adrenaline faded and Dean slowed, giving Ash a chance to listen for pursuers over the crash of their own footsteps. The slope of the hill rolled and dipped underfoot as though a stream ran nearby; Dean took the landmark for his guide and followed the slant downhill.

As they slowed from a sprint to a jog to a ground-eating march, slow enough that Dean could sidle around the shrubs and saplings with more than a split-second’s warning before impact, and Dean could feel that the cramped grip of Ash’s left hand on his shoulder was an “I can’t see a goddamn thing” grip and not a “they’re after us” grip. A steady partner and a savage wood. Dean gulped the sweet night air.

His cell vibrated.

Dean growled, his voice a silent thrum in his skull under the constant squeal of tinnitus. He shut one eye and swiped the screen. The light stabbed him in the face.

Sam had texted him.

_Secret chapel by a lake & a mining tunnel, no crosses. 2 guesses what they wanted to summon._

_Im alive thanks 4 asking_ , Dean replied. Ash snatched the phone out of this hand and Dean nearly swiped at him with his axe. Ash typed clumsily, obviously used to something with actual buttons and still hurting for his original right hand.

_Big bad has a plan,_ he typed. _nip it in the bud keep it in the woods_

“Don’t call Sam ‘it,’” Dean snapped, grabbing the phone back and deleting Ash’s words. “He’s tripping balls; he’s on the wrong side right now, but he’s still in there.”

_Be careful, I can’t vouch for everything out here & I don’t have the juice to resurrect you yet,_ Sam texted.

Ash cocked an eyebrow.

“He’s had a rough life,” Dean protested.

The phone buzzed again. _Guesses?_

_Entwives,_ Dean replied. _ur manhood_

_You suck @ this._

“Back atcha,” Dean said aloud. _What r u doing?_

Ash borrowed the phone again. _World conqst exterminatn doomsday deadite legions universewreckg dimensnl portal??? Need a bunker_

“How’s an abandoned titanium refinery sound?” Dean asked, recalling the research from the previous evening. “Photos have it looking like Khazad Dhum.”

Ash gave a thumb’s up, then made walky fingers and spread his hands close together, then far apart.

Dean took the phone back, kicked the navigation app into gear, and pointed at the creek mouth where the mill lay. A red dot gave their purported location. “Assuming the GPS is working at the moment, a couple miles.”

The phone buzzed in his hand, replacing the map with a new text.

_I’m going to fix EVERYTHING,_ Sam said.

“Well, that doesn’t sound ominous at all.”

Ash said something that looked like “Told you so.” Dean shut the phone down, opened the eye he’d been saving, and set off along the slope of the nearby creekbed toward the lake.

 

* * *

 

 

Ash stumbled through the woods behind Dean for another hour before Dean finally risked a flashlight. The night hissed with wind that could mask the crackle and scrape of demon footsteps, and the bright beam petered out into funhouse shadows a dozen yards out. Now, here and there, they spotted the shining eyes of birds and varmints. It was wrecking their night vision. They weren’t safer for it. But they were faster.

Squirrels, silent just hours ago in the daylight, chattered overhead. Made the Adirondacks seem less like a demon-blasted stretch of eldritch hunting preserve. Ash could see the pack Dean was carrying—the big duffel bag he’d arrived with, foolish in mid-flight but game-saving pretty soon—and could count his ammo and check his saw for damage. His own duffel bag, with its four sealed bricks of glorious home-made plastique, flopped heavily around his shoulder. Ash was starting to think they might win this. Not de-demon Dean’s brother, that was stupid, but maybe kill everything and go home.

One thing he was not going to do was run. Plenty of people had already died from Ash not cleaning up his messes, and by God, Dean’s idiot brother was not breaking the planet before Ash’s daughter had a chance to grow up on it.

Something struck Ash lightly in the back of the head and he let out an undignified yelp he was glad Dean couldn’t hear. He spun and drew his flashlight on the woods behind him. Overhead, a squirrel chkchkchkchkchked and crashed from branch to branch.

“Oh, you little bastard,” Ash growled, lowering the beam.

As he turned to catch back up with Dean—freaking map hog—something else struck him in the temple. It felt . . . furry. He looked down.

At his feet lay an upturned squirrel head, fuzzy lips peeled back from saber-teeth, eyes pus-white. It champed its jaws at him.

“Oh, you little bastard,” Ash breathed again, unholstering his shotgun.

“Chk-chk chk chk! Chk-chk chk chk! Chk-chk chk chk!” the head chattered.

Ash blew it into squirrel paté. “Whoa!” Dean shouted behind him.

Dean was staring at him, at the woods, at the sky, that creepy battleaxe poised over his shoulder. Ash had no idea how to mime “demonic squirrels” at him, so he led by example and ran past him, flashlight bobbing crazily. Dean’s jackboots pounded after him. Overhead, squirrels crashed and chattered and leapt from branch to branch, catching up and gaining on them with demonic menace and sciurid enthusiasm.

A squirrel landed on Ash’s face and he stumbled and fell, shotgun falling to the dirt as tiny claws hooked deep into his skin and rotten fur blinded him. He yelled and clawed at the little corpse that latched tight with claws and tail, smothering him like a face-crab, and rolled frantically as more small bodies thudded onto his knees, his throat, his groin—

“Hold still!” Dean bellowed, and Ash struggled on for a second, then froze, even as the squirrels chattered in his ears and gnawed on his jeans. Something whistled, and the squirrel on Ash’s face lost its grip and peeled away, neatly butterflied right through the torso. He looked up, and was half-blinded by the glare of the flashlight Dean held in his teeth, but he could see the axe glittering overhead, and he watched its swing as Dean whipped it down, right at the squirrel that was going for Ash’s nuts.

“Hoaraaaah!” Ash yelled, a second too late. The squirrel’s top half went flying off into the woods. The other end, Ash grabbed by the tail and flung in the opposite direction. His jeans were a little holey, but his jewels were unharmed. He shuddered in delayed terror.

“I know,” Dean said. “I’m awesome.”

The squirrel at Ash’s neck chittered menacingly, and Ash reached up and ripped it off, losing a good strip of skin with it. “Let’s see how you fly, Rocky,” he snarled in its spitting face. He gave it a toss, rolled to where his shotgun lay in the dirt, chambered a new shell, and blasted the squirrel out of the air.

The remaining squirrels squeaked, abandoned Ash’s knees, and scampered away into the woods, only to explode into squirrel hash under the dual assault of Ash’s and Dean’s buckshot. Ash gave Dean a thumb’s up.

“You roll in peanut butter or something?” Dean asked.

“Tell your demon-magnet brother to stop playing favorites,” Ash grunted, rolling to his feet.

There was a crash in the underbrush beyond their flashlight beams, something big approaching. Ash aimed his light on it and Dean’s followed, Dean’s eyes flicking from the woods to Ash’s face and back, looking for cues. Whatever was out there was way too big for a squirrel.  It smashed a few bushes and cracked a few sticks, then stopped. Crash and stop. Intelligent. Stalking. Toying with them.

Ash’s body thrummed with the unrelenting adrenaline high. His finger was tense on the trigger. Crash and stop. Crash and stop. And behind him, a whisper-footfall.

He spun, spotted white eyes, and fired. A corrupted roadkill deer reared backwards, squealing in rage from its shattered jaw. It raised one foreleg, the foot torn off somewhere, the remaining bone splintered into a menacing stake. Ash fended it off with his last shell, blasting it in one ear, and Dean sliced off its head. Black blood spurted as it cartwheeled backward in shock.

As the headless carcass staggered back to its remaining hooves, Ash switched out the shotgun for the saw. The deer charged. Ash stepped aside and swung the blade smooth as a matador’s cape and cut the torso in half, spraying the woods with intestines and half-digested leaves. The possessed deer chunks flailed ineffectually at his feet.

“Booyah!” Ash bellowed above the roar of the engine. “Man is in the forest!”

Crash and stop. Crash and stop.

Ash nudged Dean and they turned to the other menacing sounds approaching them.

A dozen pairs of demon-clouded eyes glittered dully back at them. More deer. Raccoons. Possums. Skunks. Stamping one hind foot against the loam threateningly, a bloated, leering rabbit.

Dean groaned. “You dicks, why you gotta make me gank Thumper?”

“Man up and blast him to a better place,” Ash said, patting him on the shoulder.

The nearest standing deer lowered its antlers and crouched to spring, bleating spectrally. Dean swung his shotgun and blew its head off, leaving the body staggering around to trample and scatter the smaller woodland creatures. The remaining deer squealed with demoniac rage. Dean fired at that one, clipping it on the shoulder and sending it thrashing to the dirt. Ash moved the flashlight beam away down the hill and ran, killing the saw and slinging it into the holster. Dean’s footsteps crashed along behind him, and soon Dean overtook him, shotgun in one hand and axe in the other. Ash held out a hand and they swapped shotgun and flashlight. Turning, Ash saw a pair of gleaming, wide-set eyes springing at him from the dark, and he blasted it out of the air and ran on, praying Dean and his GPS were right in their course to the titanium plant.

Gurgling water rose above the frantic crash of their sprint. Ash caught up to Dean, pointed downhill, and took off toward the sound. Dean followed, the bracken thickened to thorny vines, the air grew cold and moist, trees towered thin and spindly from racing their neighbors to the sun in the shady hillside valley. Ash saw the glint of a creek in the long wet grass, and charged in, stumbling on hummocks of marsh grass and loose wet rocks.

“Running water?” Dean demanded, overtaking him. “What’s next, a garlic allergy?”

“Doesn’t stop ‘em, just confuses ‘em,” Ash panted, climbing the bank at a run.

Dean flicked the light at him enquiringly.

Ash waved his arm around and pointed ahead of them. “Just keep going!” Something bulled its way through the bracken behind them across the creek, and Ash grabbed the flashlight from Dean and killed the switch. Dean headed off parallel to the creek, downstream, and Ash latched blindly onto his shoulder again, gun arm flinching at every rustle and crunch of leaves around them.

“Moron’s starting to grow on me,” Ash muttered to himself. “And he’s still gonna shoot me down over his little brother. Why I gotta be such a softy?”

The woods above broke open abruptly, and Dean stopped. The feeble light of cloud-stifled stars revealed a flat expanse, and the lapping of tiny waves marked it as the lake. “Mill’s on the right,” Dean yelled, at what he evidently figured was a discrete whisper. They breathed a few moments, then set off along the shoreline at a trot, kicking and pummeling their way through the brush that grew thicker here than under the smothering canopy, wading more ankle-deep streams. Something buzzed—a phone, Dean’s. Ash heard a rustle of clothing, and he barked, “Don’t—the light!” But the pale glow never came, and they remained invisible to any watchers on the mountain slopes across the water. Ash gave a long sigh. “Okay, that woulda been bad,” Dean yelled to himself ahead of him.

“Goddamn amateurs,” Ash growled.

They walked on.

After a torturous half-hour following the lakeshore, the going started to get easier. Ash found himself ducking low-hanging branches and picking out Dean’s silhouette stalking an arm’s length ahead. The ground was harder, strewn with palm-sized jagged rocks, man-made rubble that thinned out the shrubs and kept the soles of his boots from sucking into the loam. “Gimme a moonrise,” Ash muttered, checking where the sky ought to be, where the leaves left off.

The sky was still dark. The undersides of the leaves above, however, were faintly lit from below.

“That’s never good.” Dean had both flashlights now, after their encounter with the Happy Tree Friends, and they were off; Dean wasn’t playing solitaire on his phone, and lord knew Ash wasn’t advertising their presence out here. The light was a ground-level source. Dean was still blundering blithely on. Ash caught up to him, tapped him on the shoulder, and got an axe kissing his throat for the trouble. “Whoa!” he bellowed. “Same side! Same side!”

Dean lowered the axe slowly. The directionless ghost-light gleamed along its faceted blade, and picked out his eyes which did not quite seem to see him. “Ash with the hand,” Dean grunted at last.

Ash switched Dean’s shotgun to his left hand, and with his clockwork prosthesis, grabbed Dean under the chin and forced him to look up at the canopy. Dean growled and jerked away, and Ash pointed up emphatically. The light caught the plates of his gauntlet, too, and Dean looked up and was still for a moment.

“We should be running,” Dean said. “Just not sure where.”

The little wavelets that made up the sound-track to their expedition grew louder, and Ash looked out at the water. He found the light-source.

Offshore beneath the placid ripples writhed a fronded, phosphorescent hulk, the shape obscured by distance and the lake face, whose glow spread and refracted through all the water, turning each crest and bubble into an oily green lamp, a hair-crack between the pitch-dark night of the frightened living and the monstrous, unknown twilight of the unliving. Whether they had approached it or it had approached them was a question for the philosophers, Ash decided—it was moving now, in the boneless, twisting way of water worms, warping and sucking at the surface above it. A thick, tubular appendage rose dripping, its light crisp in the empty air, showing each pock and wart that cast its cold firefly glow.

“Up the hill!” Dean yelled, and charged away into the dark woods, less dark, now, so much less dark. The light, usually a sign of shelter and order and safety from ambush, oozed and slithered across the leaves before them, a dread harbinger of horrors too strange and soul-shattering to articulate, of an intelligence too ancient and unnameable for evil, nonetheless inimicable to humanity in its very incomprehensibility, its alien interest, its monstrous serenity. They ran. The trees thinned from old growth to sturdy half-century hardwoods, the ground grew drier and rockier until their boots met broken slabs of eroding concrete, and at last ahead of them gleamed four small dirty glass windows set high and wide-apart, lit by the moving creature in the lake and planted on the flanks of a concrete monolith, tall and broad and narrow like a ship on dry dock. Dean flicked on the flashlight and spotted a door, and Ash chanced a look back at the shoreline: more appendages, the glow burning fiercer, the unknown body of the being still hidden, but lumbering closer and closer to solid ground.

They reached a small bolted steel door at the same time. Ash shot the lock into chaff, and after a few tries, they kicked it in.

They were inside and the door was shut again in half a second. Dean scanned the great chamber with his flashlight, and Ash slung his duffel bag off his shoulder and dug out a flare. The ceiling was forty feet high and crisscrossed with catwalks and cobwebs; all through the great room stood sturdy concrete vats high and wide enough to stack a dozen cars inside, and the floor was littered with leaves and guano, but nothing moved. They were alone.

“Home sweet industrial plant,” Ash muttered.

“I’ve seen enough hentai to know where that was going,” Dean quipped simultaneously. Ash rolled his eyes.

 

* * *

 

The building was huge, lit only by the barely-perceptible glow of starlight from the dust-choked windows forty feet up and, once Ash dug them out of his duffel bag, the hot red sparks of flares. Overhead was a jumble of catwalks, steel troughs, and pipes. Shooting up toward the ceiling and crowding out most of the floor were two rows of huge concrete cylinders which divided the place into two pass-ways along the wall and a central alley wide enough to drive a truck of crushed ore through. Bulky machines, an air pump and an agitator motor, hunkered at the base of each cylinder like goblins under tombstones. The entire plant was about as wide as a hockey rink was long, and for length five times that. He and Dean cleared the building, alert for deadites and zombie possums, noting the three large doors on the lake-side wall that provided all the exterior access and a closed-up office on one side. As he walked, Ash got a handle on what the place had once been.

It was a floatation plant, from the titanium decades, not the iron decades. Titanium was stupidly expensive because it had to be refined by the most advanced technology 1960’s metallurgy had to offer. Inside each tank had been a foamy sludge of oils and acids, bubbling and churning at meticulously controlled rates and viscosities until a silvery scum of soapy titanium-rich foam floated to the top to be skimmed away gram by gram. The process was used by a number of mineral industries nowadays, but Ash wasn’t too sure about the particulars; he didn’t want to think about the kind of screwed he’d be if he had enough time on his hands to get a float plant up and running. He did just fine with steel, sulfur, and salt-petre, thank-you very much.

This long unused, the plant should be empty of all but concrete. But the air pumps and the motors for the agitators were still there, squat thousand-pound blocks of pipes and pistons nestling to the sides of the massive vats like goblins under tombstones. The office, behind a half-disintegrated plywood door, was still furnished with moldy potted plants, cracking naugahyde rolling chairs, steel desks, and rows of filing cabinets filled with charred paper. The ceiling was soot-stained. Like the chapel with no crosses, the place stank of a century of shadiness and stupidity.  Ash suspected the complex’s closure had had as much to do with Mr. Feely in the lake back there as with the changing post-war economy.

All that 1960’s technology made for an awful lot of money in scrap metal sitting around here, just waiting for somebody to turn it into pipe bombs.


	5. The Battlefield

Sam stomped through the black woods in a foul temper, crushing stunted bracken under his boots and scowling at low-hanging branches that didn’t jerk themselves out of his way. After all they’d been through together, Dean still couldn’t just take his word for it that Sam was fine. He’d asked, with words and gestures and everything, for Dean to stop exorcising him. Sam was an adult. Dean was an adult. They should be able to talk about these things rationally, but no, Dean had to push him until he got physical. And then he’d blame Sam for winning.

A mile from the chapel, he found his frustration evaporating. The night was cool and dark. There was a fresh wind in his hair. He had superpowers again—he couldn’t believe he’d been depriving himself for years. His mind was drifting a bit loose from his body, brushing the auras of the hills and trees; he had a new seventh sense that showed him his whole environment from the contours of the mountains to the ants under the earth; he had a warm happy buzz going that pushed all guilt and worry out of his mind; best of all, he could feel the purpose of the mining complex, the demon-haunted woods, the profane chapel and the sinister lake.

Long ago, someone had knocked on the walls of the planes of existence, and from the other side, something had carved out a door. A living door, aquatic, sessile: a transdimensional gullet. The creature’s anatomy and physiology ratted into Sam’s mind like pocket change: for digestion, a simple sac connecting unnumbered mouths as many as the dimensions it intruded upon; for prehension, a crown of twisting flabby arms lacking the skeleton to reach beyond water; for reproduction, an incestuous orgy of parasitic males, parthenogenic females, and hermaphroditic larvae. The larvae were amphibious. Twelve of them lay sealed in the deep mud of the lake where their mother’s trunk passed out of the earthly plane. As though they could sense Sam’s interest, they began to stir, breaking mud into plumes as their sturdy stumps clawed earth for the first time.

There were human bodies in the lake, too, embalmed by cold and dissolved minerals and oxygen-stripped clay, waiting to be animated.

Back in the woods, far from any view of the lake, Sam shook himself and blinked. Visions, more often than not, had someone on the other end to transmit them. Someone was indulging him.

Sam felt eyes on the back of his neck and spun around annoyed. Nothing was physically there—he couldn’t feel anything displacing the air nearby—but there was a hefty wad of demonish energy hovering a dozen yards away, processing little thoughts of Sam and the creature in the lake and the crooked hopes of what it might accomplish with them. A little bigger than Alastair had been, a little smaller than Lilith. Sam swatted at it with his brain, and it budged a little. “What do you want?”

It shaped its void-thoughts into something more concrete and transmitted them. _You are the famous Boy-King of Hell, yes?_

“That was mostly hype,” Sam replied, squinting as he concentrated on the shadows the demon-thing ate from the life-force of the nearby trees. “More of a figurehead role. What are you?”

 _I am the Emissary of the Commission,_ it said. _I offer power._

There was no such thing as free power. Power was like pets or real-estate that way: it came with obligations. “What for?”

The energy in the dark coiled evasively around itself, proofreading its thoughts, then refocused on Sam. _A humane mission. An isolated species must be led to new habitat._

Sam puzzled over this for a moment, then grinned. “You want to seed more lakes with living dimensional gates.”

 _…Yes,_ confirmed the presence.

“You want to bring something through.”

The Evil was silent.

“Conquer Earth. Bring on the Apocalypse. You need a native guide to the Modern Age so the baby gates and the Deadites don’t get mowed down by the National Guard two weeks in. Heh, baby gates.”

_Can you do it?_

Sam pondered a moment, going so far as to fold his arms and rest his chin on his fist. There’d been a number of times that Sam had _almost_ been used to end the world. He’d almost been the one to open the gates of Hell. He’d almost let Lucifer go rampaging across the planet. Dark forces had cajoled and threatened him by turns to serve their side. It had been a good couple of years since the last time, though, and at the moment Sam could admit that it had been flattering, it had been nice, to be important to somebody. Sam might have been tainted since six months old and ruined forever for a normal life, but goddamnit, his moral fortitude was the sole reason normal life existed for anyone else.

At that thought, he felt a stab of resentment that not even Deadite blood could entirely blunt. His life was so criminally unfair. All life was unfair, but Sam’s life was unfair to the _n_ th power, _n_ being his age; it was unfairness seven-times-distilled; it was all horseshit and no ponies. He was tired of people poking holes in dikes and then sticking his fingers in them.

Why did anybody build villages below sea level in the first place?

“Do you need my consent?” Sam asked.

_Collaboration is preferred. Consent is unnecessary._

Sam chewed on his lip and prodded the ball of Evil again with his mind. He could take it. Maybe. It didn’t quite feel demonic: tacky where demons were stringy, putrescence instead of brimstone, limoncello instead of bourbon. “If I do this for you,” he said, pondering his head off, “I want a pony.”

_A pony-equivalent can be arranged. My Masters will be pleased with you, General._

“What now?” Sam opened his mouth to ask, but before he could get the words out, the ball of Evil spat energy at him, projectile-vomiting its innards to form a warm soggy net that sank under his skin and settled in his skull, warping and tugging at his will to mold him to its cause. Sam coughed and pawed at his head. He hated it when things crawled inside him. They’d left marks over the years: Sam’s mind was an incompetently reconstructed mass of scars and fragments, stretched out and patched, kludged together and retrofitted, levers and gears haphazardly replaced, leaving a consciousness that functioned normally but whose operation was unique. The Commission sinking into him seemed to be having trouble recognizing the controls. Whenever it spun the wrong dial, Sam’s arms twitched and he saw sparks. “Stop it,” Sam barked. His voice echoed, reverberating from the trees and rumbling from the earth, startling him with his own power. The Commission stopped trying to brainwash him and settled back into a corner of his mind, cowed. The watchful presence in the air was gone, and the only sound was the leaves hissing in the wind.

He was a General. The fate of the world was in his hands. He straightened and stretched his arms and the unholy strength that threaded through them. It felt good.

Something huge crunched through the leaves toward him, and he stretched out his senses: four hooves, seven feet high at the withers, bloodlust and arrogance and the stench of rotting meat. It stepped into Sam’s clearing and knelt, its noble head still coming to Sam’s shoulder. Sam stretched out his hand, and it nosed him with a slobbery velvet muzzle.

“You are so much cooler than a pony,” Sam thundered.

 

* * *

 

 

After securing their surroundings, they wedged the door whose bolt they’d destroyed shut with an upturned steel desk from the plant’s office, and Dean checked his texts. Sam had sent him a picture. It was a bit hard to tell what it was of, what with the darkness, the sickly-looking orbs distorting every unoccupied foot of the frame, and the bizarre subject matter. Dean squinted and decided that that really was a fanged zombie moose munching on a mutant frog-troll. _Meet Teddy_ , Sam had written.

The phone buzzed in his hand and he stared at it. _You ok?_ It asked.

Dean sent Sam a smiley face. He looked around for Ash and almost punched him when he found him reading over his shoulder. “Looks like he’s making friends,” he explained.

Ash made a “duh” face. He strode to his bag, rooted through it, and pulled out a crinkly plastic-wrapped brick of smooth tan material. Dean blinked at the object, and when its identity occurred to him, his knees wobbled and he may have drooled a little. “Is that C4?” he croaked.

In answer, Ash pulled out another brick.

Dean made what was probably an inappropriate groaning noise. “You’re awesome.”

Ash tapped his temple and raised an eyebrow.

“Do I know how to use it? Sure, man. What’s the plan? Lay it on me.” He started to hand the phone over to Ash so he could type, but it buzzed with another message.

 _I heard the shots. Maybe things would stop trying to kill you if you stopped pissing everything off._ Dean rolled his eyes.

Ash eyed the phone like it was going to bite him.

“You try to use this stuff on Sam and I’m still gonna blow your head off,” Dean reminded him.

Ash sneered at him, seized the phone, and typed. _Thanks to u sam & his 50 closest buddys r after me 4 location of necronomicon plenty of non sam targets_

Dean took a deep breath. “So what’s the plan for the explosives? Bring the place down?”

Ash shook his head patronizingly, patted one of his bricks, and walked over to a large device of heavy pipe, one of which squatted beside each of the concrete vats that filled the main building. He typed something, then held the phone out to Dean. _Point toward enemy_

“Now you’re speaking my language,” Dean said.

 

* * *

 

 

Ash had brought four bricks of home-cooked plastique—a couple pounds, or enough to demolish one of the vats—and a handful of piezoelectric detonators, which turned out to be eleven. The detonators looked and acted like Snapple caps, were compact, inexpensive, light-weight, and waterproof, and Ash was going to apply for a patent on them one of these days. They were little curved bosses of metal laminated with polyethylene, an electron donor on one face and an electron acceptor on the other, with a hole in the middle to run a knotted string through. Pulling on the string snapped the disk and created a charge difference between the two sides of the detonator. Embed the disc in a lump of plastique before snapping it, and the small voltage would set off the boom.

Ash just needed some string. The leg of a desk through the drywall of the office exposed some nice long strands of copper wiring to serve for tripwires. There was the problem of where to set them—the wall paths, the center alley, the middle of the building or nearer the office, which was a natural fall-back. In the end, they picked two sites: across the pass-through at the exterior door nearest the office, and between adjacent cylinders facing the middle door leading into the alley. The far door, they wouldn’t worry about. The far alley, they reserved for movement and detonating the other bombs by copper pull-cords.

A twist of his steel hand, and he uncapped the crank-cases for the motors; a broken chair wedged into the safety rail for one of the stairways, and Dean steadied the caps in an improvised vise; a brush with the chainsaw, and the caps got new grooves in the sides for the wires to pass. Making the charges was a little job of putting a knot in a wire, stringing on a snap cap, and gently wrapping it all in plastique, bringing those old kindergarten ashtray-making skills into play. Down went the charge into the crank-case of a pump or motor, on went the cap, tug goes the string, boom goes the demon. Simple.

They just had to be standing on the opposite side of the cylinder from the bomb when they pulled the string.

Dean pointed up to the catwalks and Ash shrugged, weighed the advantages of better visibility and firing angles against the liability of their boots rattling on the rusty grates, and followed him up, picking a spot to crouch near the top of the ladder.

They had two wires, spaced for the most probable search patterns for a party from each of the most worrisome entrance routes. They had pull cords to detonate bombs that would spray the center alley and along the solid walls to buy time for a retreat. And they had—Ash leaned over the railing of his perch and held his flashlight over the mouth of the nearest cylinder—gigantic vats of glued-together sand. The place had barely been turned off before the company locked the doors.

Ash checked his shotgun a last time, unsnapped his hand and hung it on his shoulder rig to switch off for the chainsaw, and settled in to wait. He still had a bad feeling. He shouldn’t. The place was defensible. Dean was a decent wingman as long as whatever he aimed at didn’t look like his antichrist brother. Shotgun was loaded, saw was gassed, spark plugs were cleaned last week, choke release was in place and tested, shoes were tied, clean underwear, no deodorant but he wasn’t about to mingle in polite society.

The goddamn office. The office was the width of a hockey rink. The brick wall where the office sat was the _length_ of a hockey rink.

Ash pounded the butt of his 12-guage against the guardrail. A few yards away, Dean popped alert and scanned the ground before checking the catwalks for the source of the vibration. Ash waved him over. Dean raised an eyebrow in question.

“Goddamn invisible door,”  Ash snarled. That wasn’t right. “How come you never said anything about the thousand-square-foot office supply closet, mute boy?” That was just ridiculous. “I didn’t check all the walls all the way and now with my luck, _that_ door that I didn’t see is where they’re coming in.” There. That’s what happened.

Dean handed him his phone.

 _Extra space 4 door_ , Ash typed with his left thumb.

“You check it out, I’ll stay here,” Dean yelled, in what he evidently thought was an inside voice.

Ash growled, slapped his own ear with his free hand, and tugged Dean by the coat. “No splitting up.”

They clanked down the stairway and dog-trotted along the back alley to the corner adjacent to the office that they’d overlooked in their haste to fortify the building. Sure enough, there was a door, a big steel double door with peeling hazard signs on each side—inflammable, corrosive, volatile, irritant, hard hats required—this was raw materials storage. They wouldn’t have had a forklift shuttling back and forth from this door through the plant to the other exterior doors; there would be a fourth outside door and a big loading dock on the other side of that space, a big conspicuous “Enter Here” sign, and they’d been preparing for an hour already—five a.m. by Ash’s watch, and the sun had to break through some time, the Deadites had to come for him before then, and there was no way to bomb this door. Ash could wrap some plastic around a snapper and shoot it and make a loud noise and a bright light.

He was starting to not mind Dean, hell, he’d been a great guy to get a beer with. But Ash hadn’t checked the building out all the way and now the Deadites were going to come howling through that door and Dean was going to die and Ash was never going to make it to Kalamazoo. He couldn’t be bothered to dot his i’s or check his corners or test his turning radius or memorize his incantations; he was a failure as a student and a hero and a father; he was forty-two goddamn years old and he’d still never met a puddle of gasoline without dropping a match in it.

They were going to come crashing through that door any second. He aimed his shotgun, resting the barrel on the chainsaw’s motor, and Dean took aim beside him, probably assuming Ash had heard something. He hadn’t. But after all these years, he got a feeling about things.

Behind them came a boom and the ring and shriek of ricocheting shrapnel. Ash spun around, ears ringing.

“I heard something,” Dean hissed.

They backtracked between the vats and the rear wall and chanced a peek down the center aisle, where a flare they’d stashed to snipe by burned high overhead under a suspended steel trough. Twitching chunks of meat littered the concrete and black blood splattered the walls of the tanks near the middle door. The Deadites had taken the direct route, walking heedlessly into the tripwire, smack in the center of the plant.

Dean hefted his shotgun and battleaxe and raced up the back pass-way. A rising sibilant chorus of deceased gurgling throats hid the thud of his boots: “We’re gonna get you, we’re gonna get you,” and a bluish glow joined the dry orange blaze of the flare. After a moment’s deliberation, Ash adjusted his shoulder harness and followed Dean, darting closer to the incursion from behind the float tanks and checking on the pull-cords of the improvised bombs as he passed.

They both stopped at the first line of sight to the middle door, leaning out with their heads stacked like Moe and Curly.

The bombs had detonated beautifully, the motors that housed them reduced to shreds of glowing shrapnel. But the carcass between the bombs wasn’t one Deadite, wasn’t ten Deadites; it was some kind of perverted love-child of a sea-cucumber and a hippopotamus, all knobby black skin and stubby radial arms and massive rubber-lipped jaws, about the size of a Ford Ranger, and it had soaked up the brunt of the blast. They needed a bigger boom.

“Weeeee’re gonna geeeet you, weeeee’re gonna geeeeet you,” the wet rotting voices from beyond the door sang, and then, “Duuuuuust in the wind! All you are is dust in the wind!” The blueish light from outside shifted, warping the shadows around them, and all at once a little troop of humanoid forms rushed in.

Ash and Dean each shot a head off two, which dropped with satisfying splats, but the rest took cover behind the hippo-cucumber and began to roll the carcass deeper into the plant. They heaved and shoved and slipped in its sea-rot blood, and by slow splats they advanced into the center aisle. Behind them, a couple dozen human-made Deadites filed in, chattering their bare jawbones and squelching in the water-logged boots they’d drowned in. They all looked like men, all wore jeans and work boots, all fit the profile for mine workers through the last couple centuries.

Dean kept watch on one side of the pillar and Ash kept watch on the other, and when the bulk of the troop shuffled into range, just as the rolling carcass slopped past, Dean snapped his fingers, they both fell back behind the cover of the bat’s concrete flanks, and Ash yanked the pull-cord to the bomb on the other side.

Sweet thunder. Echoes of the shockwave rocked through him like a heart attack, the massive concrete wall of the vat seemed to jump a foot against his shoulders, and steel shards screamed and rang as they pin-balled around the plant. Dean swatted at his forehead and his hand came away bloody—collateral.

A Deadite howled, “Boss, what gives? I’m on my last leg here!”

There was a heavy sigh, oddly distinct in the midst of the gurgle and scrape of Deadite chunks rolling around the floor, and then a nearly human voice: “Okay, guys, everybody who’s still mobile, fall back—”

Oh, hell, no. If they were ever going to cut numbers on the Deadites, the army had to keep advancing, had to walk through the traps. Ash sprinted out of cover into the center aisle, narrowly missed getting his boot stuck in a putrid ribcage, and punched the saw out against the pull-cord. The vats spread out on each side, blocking his view to either side. Filling the alley ahead was a pile of black slimy limbs and tentacles, giblets of immobilized corpse, and beyond that, a crowd of dead miners, four more octopotamuses, and Dean’s idiot brother holding a flashlight and riding a moose.

“You gonna let that kid tell you what to do?” Ash bellowed at the Deadites. “He doesn’t even know what side he’s on!”

Two dozen Deadites looked from Sam to Ash. Bloodlust blazed in their corpse-white eyes. “The Book!” one said. “Boss, he protects the Book!”

Sam’s fancy flashlight swept the plant suspiciously. “Sit tight,” Sam ordered, his hoarse Deadite voice carrying. “It’s a trap.”

But the Deadites weren’t so easily restrained. “Ash!” they chorused in a voice like a gale through tall pines, “Ash-leeeeey! Do you remember us? We remember you. We owe _everything_ to you!”

“S’why I’ll be putting you back where you came from if it takes me my whole life to do it,” Ash growled.

“He doesn’t have the Book now,” one said. “He can’t use it on us.”

There was a soft smack of palm meeting face. “Seriously, guys, it’s a trap. No one’s gonna help you scrape yourselves off the floor.”

“Come get some!” Ash bellowed, revving the saw.

The mob moved. Ash pulped a skull with the 12-guage, and as they closed on him, he disarmed an eager beaver with the saw, but this was too much, too many—an octopotamus, caught up in the stampede, was thundering up on his right, gnashing its six-jawed maw—he retreated as slowly as he dared, slow enough not to trip but fast enough not to be surrounded, past one vat, past two, then the third was the one with the pull-cord, only here three Deadites stood between him and blast-cover, and they were cutting suspicious looks at the dark alleys on either side. He’d have to cut his way out if he was getting to cover before Dean blew the motor. He shot one and racked one-handed, cut down a second with a swipe of his right arm, but the third shambled into his path—just as Dean’s glittering stone axe sliced through its neck.

Ash took the opening and skidded into shadow. Dean yanked the pull-cord and the shockwave rocked the concrete again. “Suck on C-4, bitches!” Ash gloated.

In the ringing silence, there was an exasperated, sepulchral sigh. “Goddamnit, Dean.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sam's bit at the beginning will get moved around after the next chapter gets posted.


	6. Chapter 6

The saw roared on, the vibration burning up through Ash’s joints to rattle comfortingly in his lungs, the air reeked of the gore and fire of a job well done, and when he pumped his shotgun a new shell slid home, but still Ash felt the wet bony fingers of fear tickle up and down his spine. He dug an elbow into Dean’s shoulders where he crouched beside him, though he knew Dean couldn’t hear his brother call.

An octopotamus gave a phlegmy groan and its six legs scuffed the floor as it collapsed.

“Ash, I know you’re both here,” Sam said. Hoofbeats clunked softly as the hoarse voice moved. There was the thunder and growl of a Hellish legion in the undertones, but the sum of it all was still that midwestern kid who couldn’t stomach a hockey game. “If you’re not both here, if you left Dean outside on his own, there’s gonna be consequences. Like we discussed. You want to send him out?”

Dean was pushing back against Ash’s arm but in a “get the hell off me and let me see what’s out there” way, not a “let me go exorcise my little brother through the power of my doglike loyalty” way. Dean caught his eye and Ash shook his head.

“Thanks for trying to protect him, but you’re not helping anymore, Ash.” The voice changed, from hoarse and human but with an unfathomable, ancient depth and force behind it, to impossibly clear. Beyond the thrum of the saw and the mutinous murmur of the remaining Deadites it was clear. Through the ring in his ears from the blasts it was clear, and the sound of that voice felt like dangling over a precipice above a polluted throng of suffering souls. It was the touch of the diabolical. “Can you hear me now?” it asked.

Dean was still under his arm, though Ash tensed.

The voice twisted, in an inward way, the vertigo of its touch changing direction and intensity. “How about now?”

“Sammy?” Dean rasped, in what was not at all an inside voice. He shoved to his feet and Ash let him. He was sick of protecting people who didn’t want to live. “Are you—”

“I can’t fix your ears yet, sorry man,” Sam replied, reasonable, friendly, a sucking void in Ash’s brain.

“Get out of my brother you yellow-eyed piss stain,” Dean snarled, striding out into the open.

Sam laughed. The cliff in Ash’s head trembled. “What, you want me to rip my soul out? Dean, it’s me. I mean, sure, I’ve got this imperative to conquer Earth so the Gods of the First Age can climb back to the living plane and frolic in the ashes of civilization, but that’s not what’s important.”

In most circumstances, having a running chainsaw attached to his right arm made stealth difficult, but the concrete box of a float plant nursed the echoes so long they sounded like they were coming from every corner. Ash slunk away toward the office through the shadows cast by the flare up under the catwalk and by Sam’s flashlight, leaned low around one of the vats, and looked out.

Dean stood in the center aisle, flanked by two half-dead octopotamuses. Evil Sam sat at ease on his trusty steed, face in shadow. The moose looked as big as a Clydesdale, with antlers like wingback chairs, a long droopy nose, and a neck as thick as Ash’s torso. It lowered its head and tore a long strip of still-twitching flesh from one of the Deadite legs scattered around the aisle; Sam kicked it in the ribs, and it lifted its head, swallowed, and belched, a mean look in its bulgy white eyes.

“Not what’s important?” Dean parroted, gravelly.

“You ever think about what we’ve been through?” Sam asked. “Everyone we’ve lost, all the hits we’ve taken, and how we’re both still here talking right now? Seems like every time we try to mind our own business, something comes looking for us and it’s us against the world. Us against the universe. And things’ll just keep happening, the hits’ll keep coming, and we can’t stop ‘till we’re dead for good. We’ve got our problems, I know, god do I know, and I let you down last year, I’m sorry—I let the world get between us, I let people get between us—but I can break the cycle. I got an idea.

“Hell’s got too much politics, Heaven’s just daytime reruns, and I don’t know about Purgatory but it sure doesn’t seem like a relaxing spot to retire, but there’s still Earth. Hear me out.

“I bring the armies of Candar to the living world, once I get the Necronomicon and set up some dimensional drop-points. I seal off Heaven and Hell, harvest all the souls on the planet, saving the people we like for last, then send the Deadites to Purgatory and seal that off after. We keep Earth. We go swimming in the pool under the White House, I magic up all the zombie servants we need for creature comforts, and if we budget out the souls pretty carefully, we can live in peace until the heat death of the universe. No angels, no demons, no ghosts, no cops, just you and me. We can retire, Dean.

“What do you say?”

As Evil Sam monologued, Ash had jogged down the back aisle to the door at the end of the plant that led to the storage space adjoining the offices and eased the latch open. As Dean opened his mouth to deliver some incredibly sarcastic or embarrassingly sappy line—hard to anticipate with the Winchester brothers—Ash hauled on one half of the double door. It let out a tortured squeal of dry hinges.

Ash looked over his shoulder and saw Sam, and a second later, Dean, scowling at him. So much for a stealthy retreat. “I swear to God I’ll blow my own head off before I let you two wipe out my planet! You’ll never find the Book!”

Sam nudged the flanks of his nightmare moose and it broke into a gliding trot. “Yeah, great plan,” Sam called as he approached. “So when I send a spirit to download the memory from your splattered tapioca, you won’t even be there to contest the possession.”

“You can try,” Ash fired back. “Did a spell, sealed my memories against you freaks.”

Sam’s mouth pulled sideways. “There’s no such spell.”

“Check the Necronomicon. Oh, wait.”

“Like you read Sumerian—”

“It’s called money, Hobo Joe! I wave around a couple grand, and the world starts going my way!”

Behind Sam, Dean and the still-ambulatory Deadites were jogging to catch up with them. A couple Deadites made a grab for Dean and he whipped around with his 12-guage, fired, and dropped the shotgun to finish the job with the obsidian axe. Sam wheeled the moose around on its hind legs. “I told you guys he’s off limits!” he roared.

Ash sprinted two vats up the cover aisle and grabbed hold of the wire to the last at-will engine bomb. As he hauled back to yank it, Dean roared, “Sam, take cover!”

If Dean wanted to live, he’d be taking cover, too. Ash pulled the copper line.

It popped loose in his left hand. There was no boom.

“I’m guessing you weren’t a boy scout,” Sam remarked.

“Screw you, that’s two out of three.” Ash set down his shotgun, killed the chainsaw, unclamped it from his stump, and latched his hand back into place. A distraction—he fished a shell out of his pockets and sent it clicking and pinging along the concrete, suspiciously grenade-like. Dean cursed, the moose jumped, and Ash sprinted back down the aisle to the mysterious double doors, pitched the saw through the gap, and base-slid in behind it. Inside was black and windowless. He collided with something round and heavy, a fifty-gallon drum. Leaning against it was a stack of cracked pine pallets. He kicked one apart and ripped out a length of timber to bar the door.

Before he could jam the bar into place, something large and human-shaped squeezed through. Ash lashed out with his steel hand, and the intruder caught his fist before it made contact.

“Freaking ow,” Dean hissed, shaking his hand out.

“Would it kill you to pick a side?” Ash yelled. He grabbed Dean by the collar, shoved him aside, yanked the door shut and slipped his board between the floor-to-ceiling latch-bolts. He grabbed more pallets and jammed them under the handles to stop them from turning, and then he and Dean shoved barrels against the doors for good measure.

Dean flicked on his flashlight, and they examined the store-room.

Steel drums on pallets filled the floor, four to a pallet and two pallets tall, then more pallets high above on tracks and lifts, nearly to the ceiling. Blandly sinister warnings were stenciled across their flanks, red triangles with flames, blue diamonds, green clouds. The floor was sticky with an asphalt ooze frosted with a delicate bloom of crystallized salts. The door, the barrels, and the tracks and walkways above were all crusted thickly with rust.

“Ooh, this’ll be good,” Ash muttered. He patted down his pockets—he had it, he knew he’d grabbed it while they were waiting for Sam to show—and came up with a plastic baggie of aluminum shavings.

“We’re not Hunting Sam,” Dean announced out of the blue. “He’ll fight his way back. He’s still in there.”

“Yeah, he’s made that abundantly clear,” Ash said. He lit the last of the flares and set it carefully on a section of concrete that didn’t have caustics, acids, solvents, or oil spilled on it, then beckoned Dean over to one of the step ladders that was more rust than steel. He used the back of his pocket knife to scrape some rust off into the bag and handed the knife and the bag to Dean.

“You want me to scrape rust into this bag,” Dean said dubiously. Ash twirled his arms at the stepladder and stood aside. “Is this some kind of spell—” Dean shook his head and his eyes lit up. “Dude, are we making _thermite?_ ”

Ash patted him on the back. “Knew there was a reason I let you tag along.” He left Dean on rust detail, scrape-scraping with the knifeback and making all the steel of the walkways ring, and toured the storage room, checking out the labels on the rows and rows of barrels.

There was ammonia—eh. Sulfuric acid—now we’re cooking. Phenol—groovy. Petroleum spirits over sulfuric acid over phenol—Ash rattled up one of the other step ladders, sidled around the barrels that crowded the sagging steel scaffolding, and cast about for something to use as a funnel. There were ceramic flowerpots and coffee mugs abandoned in the office, fifty feet away across a brick wall and a siege-force of Deadites, but here in the store-room were canister lights, big arc lamps under textured soup-can-sized glass cylinders. Ash hazarded that that glass had a melting point with a lot of digits. The lamps stuck out from the wall on precarious steel arms, just within reach if Ash stood on the first cross-beam of the catwalk’s rust-warped hand-rail and leaned out. He climbed up, leaned out, snapped off a glass lampshade in his steel grip, and didn’t fall to his death. The railing was visibly bent after he got down.

He set the lampshade on top of his chosen barrel of petroleum spirits, just as Dean yelled from below him, “Bag’s full!”

“Toss ‘er up,” Ash replied, holding out his left hand. Dean threw, Ash caught the baggie. He gave it a shake, poured the dull powdery rust and the glittering aluminum shavings into the confining ring of the glass lampshade, then leaned over the catwalk, mimed starting up his saw, and waved his arms for that, too. Dean obligingly backtracked to the saw and passed it up to him. Ash dug his other knife and a magnesium fire-block out of his pockets and whittled off a nice little magnesium garnish to ignite the thermite, then cut a long ribbon of cotton off the cuff of his jeans, dipped it into the chainsaw’s gas tank, shook off the excess two-stroke mix, and draped it carefully over the lampshade so that one end rested on the magnesium shavings as a fuse. It was about two feet long.

There was a boom and some frustrated rotten-throated grunting from the door they’d come in by. That answered the question of whether the Deadites would go for this trap.

“Exit’s this way,” Dean yelled from the opposite end of the store-room.

The fuse was too short.

Ash did not have the time or energy to shred his clothes into seventy feet of cloth to soak in motor oil. An hour ago, they’d gotten by setting their mines with copper wiring, but really, he needed rope. He was never leaving home without a reel of string ever again. Maybe jute. That was both strong and absorbent. He kicked his leg up onto the handrail and hacked off more of his jeans, which he shredded and split into a spiral, about four feet long stretched out. He dunked the whole thing in two-stroke mix and tied it onto the other fuse. Then, after a moment’s deliberation, he lit the end.

All the gasoline caught at the same time, a puff and a mocking flare of golden light. Then the magnesium shavings sparked white, and unstoppably, gloriously, terribly, the thermite reacted. Ash lurched backward away from the orange slag sputtering through the air. The aluminum burned; white hot iron pooled at the bottom of the lampshade for a fraction of an instant before it melted the top of the barrel and a fountain of burning oil roared out. Ash snagged the saw, hopped the railing, landed on a tower of barrels, and jumped the remaining ten feet.

Behind him, burning puddles splattered the tar-coated floor. Ash sprinted for the door to the plant, where the Deadites hammered against the barricade; he overturned a couple barrels in their way. The Deadites body-slammed the doors almost the moment the barrels were clear, splintering the flimsy board that barred them and forcing Ash to make a dive unless he wanted to be knocked on his face.

He rolled to his feet and yanked the saw to life. The Deadites massed just inside the threshold, a dozen water-logged white-eyed corpses and one lumbering triple-jawed slime-beast, hesitant.

“Wassa matter, scared of a little fire?” Ash called, brandishing the saw.

One of the Deadites picked up the mess of gore and cartilage that dangled down its chest like a Bolivian necktie and pressed it into the hole under its jaw so it could talk. “Now this looks like it just might be a trap.”

Ash spread his arms. “You know you want a piece of this!”

The Deadite with the attached neckwear raised one eyebrow and clicked its jaw in and out of joint. “You’re pretty tough. Might take some cooking.”

Behind Ash, Dean yelled, “Tell Sammy I’m sorry,” and ran into the storehouse under a rain of burning petroleum, disappearing behind a curtain of flame rising from the tarry floor.

“Stop him! Boss’ll eat us!” the Deadites bellowed, and rushed the doorway _en masse_ ; Ash backpedalled—clearing a path into the fiery destruction—and in a matter of seconds, the Deadites were out of sight and out of hearing; the store-room was a wind tunnel, the air was oilsmoke and chlorine, the floor was napalm. Something exploded above him; the towers of barrels blocked the splatter. Ash killed his saw and clutched its vulnerable gas tank under his coat as he ran.

He passed the hissing slag of his oil-acid-phenol sandwich, trying to breathe through his jacket collar, when he ran into Dean. He’d like to say he almost blew Dean’s head off, but his shotgun was overhead on the catwalk, forgotten. Dean grabbed him by the coat and roared, “This way!” like Ash hadn’t figured that out, and they hauled ass for the exit.

At an explosion behind them, Ash turned and got a glimpse of his shotgun leaping off the catwalk to land in the bubbling thermite cauldron.

Screw it. They raced for the back door so fast that by the time they got it unbolted, their pant legs were only on fire halfway up the shins and the back of Ash’s neck was barely second-degree-burned. They burst into the sweet cold pre-dawn air and gasped it down. The fire blazed hotter and closer as they slammed the door on it. They stamped their feet, blinking in the dimness.

A bluish light flicked on.

As Ash looked up from his smoldering ankles, he recalled suddenly that the Deadites they had lured into the storeroom had been leaderless. Evil Sam gazed down at them, flashlight in hand, from astride his moose, and a platoon of Deadites and a dozen octopotamuses flanked him.

“Dean, there’s acid on your sleeve. Take your coat off before it eats your arm,” he said.

Dean obligingly took his Carhartt coat off. Sam snapped his fingers and the burning tar on their boots snuffed out.

“Making nice, kiss-ass?” Ash blustered.

The moose snorted regurgitated meat at him. “You prefer being on fire?” Sam offered.

Dean stepped away from the door, between Sam and Ash, which Ash was going to complain about when he got around to it. “I can’t let you do this,” Dean said. “Come on, man, after what you did to save the world you know you’re gonna regret this in the morning.”

Sam curled his lip. “ _Let_ me, Dean? These larvae aren’t going down for anything less than C4 or a rocket launcher. You want to walk up and shove bombs down their throats? Your only option is to shoot me. And that won’t work for long.”

“You’re not Sam. I’ll figure something out.”

Evil Sam glared. The moose strafed back and forth in a half-circle, man-sized antlers lowered. “You can’t just say I’m not me anymore every time I do something you disagree with! Newsflash—you don’t know anything about me!”

“I know what you went through to save the world,” Dean insisted, faithful as a Catholic martyr.

“Screw the world, I did it for _you!_ ” Sam exploded. “So you’d stop looking at me like I’m a frickin—well, maybe vampire, but that doesn’t exactly mean what it used to, does it?”

Dean made a muffled choking noise and stumbled backward into Ash. Ash didn’t care what depths of consternation Dean was swimming in—Dean’s 12-guage was lax in his hand. Ash snatched it up, swung it at Sam’s head, and fired.

The moose bucked, sending its master bouncing off into the woods behind it. Ash shoved Dean to the ground and sprinted for his target, racked and fired again—empty. He tossed the shotgun aside and started his chainsaw. Instinct made him duck at the scuffle of boots behind him and there was a whistle and a sudden sting in the back of his head. Ash pivoted from weak target to strong, and faced Dean Winchester, hunting’s versatility extraordinaire who may or may not have been raised from Hell as a demon five years ago, eyes glittering in the dim glow of approaching dawn, sinister stone axe upraised for a second swing.

The rules of Hunting these days were: finish the job, be discrete, and don’t go after Sam Winchester for being demon-spawn unless you’d already burned Dean’s corpse yourself. Ash never was much for following the rules.

Dean’s axe flashed down and Ash swung his saw up to meet it. Chips of obsidian fountained into the air, along with, disturbingly, sparks of steel. They each went for a groin kick at the same time and Ash ended up with a bruised shin when neither found their target. Of all the ways to go, death by shin-kicking from getting between the psychotic Brothers Grim on an extermination run was on the pointless and humiliating side—and immediate, and likely, and looming over him with the pure and unreasoning hostility of a frightened animal destroying a threat. If he didn’t put Dean down, Ash was going to die.

He had better things to do than die caught between these idiots. Like watch the sun rise, drive to Kalamazoo, buy Ruth an ice cream or a pony after the dance recital. And stop Sam from unleashing a plague of Deadites and graboids on the world, so Ruth could have her dance recital. So maybe Ash should have thought better than to get between Dean and Sam, but Dean should know better than to stand between Ash and an Apocalypse.

Ash bent his knees and shoved, the blade of his saw sparking against Dean’s stone axe like a lightsaber. Dean shuffled backward, drawing the axe back for another swing, and Ash pitched his saw through the air after him. Dean fended it off with the axe; the saw bit on for an instant, suspending itself in the air, and Dean spun away from the uncontrolled engine of dismemberment as it chewed the stone edge of his weapon like an enraged beaver. Ash seized the opening, grabbed Dean’s right wrist in his left hand and swung a bone-shattering punch with his steel right.

The punch never connected.

An invisible fist slammed Ash backward and into the air; twenty feet up, he crashed through a tree whose limbs clutched around him like a schoolyard toady pinning him down for a beating.

The biggest kid on this particular playground stalked into view below him, yellow eyes glimmering in the twilight and one arm upraised like Darth Vader in a strangling mood. “You get that the only reason I’ve let you live is to play hearing ears for Dean, right? Bad move, Ash.” The tree tightened its grip until his joints felt ready to snap.

“Eat me, brat,” Ash grunted. “Big brother looks mad.”

Dean lurched over to Sam, reached up, and grabbed him by the shoulders, staring intensely into his jaundiced eyes and cadaverous face. “Sam, stop. You’re not doing this.”

“What, because he’s human? Because he’s got a point? Like that even means anything anymore—”

“Because I don’t want to deal with your self-flagellation when you sober up. Because Earth’s the best place I’ve seen so far and even if we never get to keep a piece of the pie at least it’s there for somebody else. Like—like that girl you were with—”

“They all die eventually,” Sam growled. His face folded and his shoulder slumped. “It’ll be done. When the Old Ones are pacified and the Earth is cleared off, we’ll be done. I just want to be done.”

“Never took you for a quitter,” Dean said, and Ash had been known to put a foot or two in his mouth, but ouch.

The tree clenched around his bones. Ouch.

“No one made you come find me,” Evil Sam yelled, flapping his arms at his sides. “I’m sorry I’m not as strong as you. I’m sorry I’m broken.” He reached into his coat and pulled out a bone-handled knife with blade-breakers all along the spine and Arabic-looking characters on the flat. “If you don’t like my plan, why don’t you just put me down.”

Ash’s eyes popped. That had to be the Knife: the Winchesters’ famous demon-killing knife that rumor said they killed a demon for, that an angel gave Dean so he could kill his brother if he went psycho, that Bobby Singer hired a witch to forge for them.

Sam extended the Knife, hilt-first, to his brother, and Dean stared at it with an uncomprehending expression as though Sam had been speaking into his ears instead of his brain.

It was a neat fox-goose-grain puzzle. The only guy sane enough to put Sam out of action was Ash, stuck in a tree like a bug in a glass case, and all the weapons were down on the ground with Dean. Dean currently looked more likely to stab himself in the heart than Sam.

The octopotamuses squolched and burbled and stamped their feet, like the brainless shock cavalry they were, but the Deadites surrounding them were muttering and watching Sam. One of them had its fingers in its mouth and occasionally spat out chunks of skin and nail.

“ _Hear me!_ ” Ash yelled in Sumerian. Sam, the Deadites, and even the muck monsters cocked their heads at him, and worse, Ash suddenly felt the weight of the dread gaze of the unseen Thing that roamed the woods. In the back of his mind, so faint he might be imagining it, he heard that perverse childlike chorus, “We’re gonna get you, we’re gonna get you.”

“You seriously trusting that asshole with your army?” Ash demanded to the fading night, switching back to English. His Sumerian was limited to a few choice phrases and cursewords. “He’s not even on your side! He’s gonna kill your golden goose and send you back home!”

The demonically animated corpses of the drowned miners turned mutinous mutters to Sam, and Sam’s pet moose stepped between his master and the army protectively. Sam raised an eyebrow. “The spirits need a general. This mean you want the job?”

“Check your history, buddy. _It_ wants _me_ for the job.” He could feel it in the weight of the gaze on him. He stared back, meeting its eyes if there were any eyes hovering there unseen, and his legs began to tremble with the need to run. “Yeah, you got it bad, doncha?” His voice cracked. “Couldn’t wait for another taste, you had to make ten more Ashes—”

The Thing peered at him, and Ash tried his best to flatten himself even more against the tree trunk. An amused consciousness pressed into his mind, so huge and deformed he had to choke back vomit. _You think you can serve us better than the Boy-King of Hell?_ it challenged, not in words but in a sort of articulate hum, a texture in the air that made itself understood through brute force. _That you, defiant erstwhile Hero From The Sky, would be more faithful?_

“Rumor has it your ‘King of Hell’ is some kind of black widow, goes darkside to save the world for a party trick. _That’s_ your hero. Me? I’m just an asshole dumb enough to start a grudge match with Ultimate Evil instead of the neighbor with the fancy mower.”

The woods groaned and the presence seemed to rotate around him, pondering.

“I’ve been marked by demonic evil since I was six months old!” Sam bellowed, spreading his arms in exasperation.

“You spent your whole life rising above that shit!” Dean interrupted.

“Stay out of this!”

All the trees creaked at once and the air shimmered, density gradients billowing unnaturally as though the whole forest was flooded with new-forged steel. _One of you, prove your loyalty in battle_ , the Evil rumbled. _Quickly_.

With a roar like a howitzer firing, the tree that imprisoned Ash exploded and spilled him to the ground in a shower of limbs and splinters. He staggered to his feet, stumbling on numb legs and tree guts. Across the clearing, Sam stood watching him with one eyebrow raised. Ash wasn’t a guy to shrink from a fight, but Sam was unfairly tall, unfairly built, unfairly young, and unfairly possessed. “How do I know when I win?” Ash demanded the darkness.

One of Sam’s Deadites picked up a long straight stick, walked into a clearing in the woods that abutted the float plant, rammed the stick into the ground, yanked its own head off, and jammed it on top as a standard.

“What’re you doing, man?” Dean called from the sidelines. “Some kind of battle royale? Come on, you can quit this right now.”

“Couple of you grab my brother and keep him from hurting himself,” Sam bellowed at the remains of his army. “Rest of you—I hear you don’t do so well in daylight, so start burrowing.”

A couple Deadites approached Dean, arms spread peaceably, and Dean welcomed them with a stone-cold snarl and a raised battle-axe. In the main ranks, the hulking slime-beasts began to scoop aside massive paw-fulls of dirt, the human Deadites pitching in with hands and tree-branches. Sam scanned the proceedings, and in the moment before he turned back toward Ash, Ash grabbed a chunk of wood and hurled it at Sam’s head.

“J—C—Ow!” Sam sputtered, clutching his bleeding scalp.

Ash was already half-way to the stick with the Deadite head on it. The head gave him a conspiratorial wink as Ash dove into a baseball slide, reaching for the pole. He stopped inches from it, an invisible grip jerking him back like a harness, then he was tumbling along the muddy, shrapnel-strewn ground. He landed spread-eagled on his back, pinned and helpless as Sam strode toward the goal-post.

“ _Unclean spirit, avaunt!_ ” Ash yelled in Sumerian.

Sam paused and snorted at him. “I’m not even moving toward you, how’m I supposed to ‘avaunt?’”

Dammit, he knew there was a command for this. “Approach” would put him worse off than he’d started. Kat-cho-something. What he wanted was “hold still.” Goddammit, why did all words of power have to be in dead languages?

“ _Unclean spirit, reveal yourself!_ ” Ash yelled, struggling to peel himself off the knobby ground. “ _Avaunt! Approach! Avaunt!_ ”

Sam flinched and hunched his shoulders as though Ash had dropped ice and spiders down the back of his shirt. “You know you just ordered me to show you my boobs? Cut it out.”

“ _Approach! Avaunt!_ ”

“Shut up!” Sam whirled on him and flung out power like a baseball. But either the meaningless and contradictory commands had broken his concentration, or he couldn’t silence Ash and pin him to the ground at the same time, because Ash got loose enough to grab another log and pitch it at him. Sam deflected it with a wave of telekinesis, releasing his hold on Ash entirely. Ash rolled to his feet and sprinted at the game post again. Sam finally showed some hustle and ran a few steps. Ash veered off sideways and dove into a flying tackle on Sam’s knees. Sam toppled. Ash came inches from getting the wind knocked out of his lungs by Sam’s ass; as it was, Sam sprawled on top of him as immoveable as a fallen forklift.

As Sam rolled himself upright and started to get his feet untangled, Ash latched onto his belt and yanked. Sam flopped down again, bashing his face on Ash’s fist. “Ow!” he yelped. “God, you’re a pain in the ass!”

“You mean pain in the neck.” Ash reached his steel hand up and locked onto Sam’s throat. Sam choked and clawed at the hand-forged steel. Whirlwinds of telekinetic power tugged on Ash’s limbs and clothes, and Sam kicked out savagely with his heavy boots, but Ash’s hand was locked down with its springs and ratchets; the only way Sam was getting loose was if he left a chunk of his neck behind, which fortunately he refused to do. They rolled over and over on the cold ground snapping kicks and punches whenever a tempting face or crotch or solar plexus blundered into range. Ash bled red. Sam bled black. Sam’s face was turning grayer, his breathing rasped, and his flickering yellow eyes grew dim and rolled back behind his eyelids.

Either possuming, or a little more human than he looked.

Ash slammed Sam’s head into the ground a couple times, popped him upside the chin for good measure, then took a deep breath, unlatched his hand, and made one last sprint for the goalpost. The Deadite head hooted at him and smacked its lips. Behind him, Sam wheezed. Ash scanned the edge of the clearing and found Dean, pinned down for his own protection by a half-dozen battered Deadites. Their eyes met, and Ash returned Dean’s snarl with a one-finger salute. He grabbed the stick and waved the Deadite head at the sky.

The gray hesitant sky cracked open and a lightening-bolt blazed down through Ash’s upraised arm to the soles of his boots, charging him with power and responsibility. His skin warped, blood and weakness and life steaming out of him, his bones flexed themselves like muscles and his muscles bulged like bones. All the aches and bruises and cuts and scrapes of the night fell blessedly irrelevant, mere blemishes on an unkillable corpse.

As he exulted in his unlife, information flooded him: his legions from the mine, workers sacrificed to the lake a few at a time over fifty years of operations, numbered forty-eight, soon to be forty-six if Dean had his way on the edge of the clearing. The great many-jawed hulks had a name, a name too horrible for human brains to contain, but which might be rendered by a jumble of discordant consonants; they were amphibious larval forms of a species that in adulthood spanned dimensions and would serve as a conduit for his new Masters to touch his world or for human souls to leave it. Sam, staring with shock in his sickly gold eyes, was cut off from both authority and duty—freed up to pitch in for the other side, too little, too late.

And here Ash realized what a bone-headed move he’d just made. He’d expected a compulsion—maybe a voice, or an urge, or a pain, or a lust for battle driving him to serve the Evil as the new general of the Deadites. He’d expected something to push against. As though to prove that Evil could on occasion work smarter not harder, the Commission had turned Ash around inside himself until he was thinking of his Masters with a capital M.

Gone was his sacrifice play. Now he was conquering Earth for the Great Old Ones.

He’d start with Sam, because Sam was closer. No, Dean—Dean’d be easier. But that left Sam free to stab him in the back as he took Dean out. He raised his arm and stretched out his mind, willing the air to lift Dean off the ground and throttle him, but apparently the Dark Side of the Force was a demon-spawn special. He snapped his fingers and made a cut-throat gesture at three of the most useless-looking Deadites, and they shuffled over to keep Dean busy, or snuff him, you never knew. Now he was free to handle Sam.

This generalling stuff was hard.

Just a dozen yards away, Sam was rising to his feet and massaging his bruised and Deadite-bitten throat. He coughed and pointed vaguely at Ash with a wobbly arm.

“Oh, no,” Ash rumbled. “Kid, you’re out like Slippery Dick.”

Sam looked over his shoulder, and Ash chanced a glance back. His Deadites had circled Dean; Dean held them at bay with flashing swings of his obsidian battleaxe, but Ash noted with approval that the Deadites were throwing logs at him. He wouldn’t hold out long.

Sam’s fingers curled into a claw.

“Trying to choke out a demon? Whole new brand of stupid.”

Sam’s yellow eyes narrowed and he straightened his shoulders. He flexed something—the air bent around him—it felt like a sound. Like a yawn.

Ash remembered why Sam was wearing those yellow eyes in the first place—so he could exorcise himself. He’d obviously lost interest in that project, but there he was stretching out his hand as though he could rip the metaphorical crown right off Ash’s head.

“Persistent little bastard,” Ash snarled, and broke into a tackling charge.

Sam stood there, still and confident as though Ash were a paper target wheeling toward him across a firing range, and wasn’t that a comforting thought. His eyelids fluttered closed, and his face smoothed, and something sliced under Ash’s skin, precise as a fillet knife and pervasive as the smell of rot. His soul was peeling. Ash staggered to the ground and panted steam; his hands trembled; mortal weakness welled up as the power he’d barely had a chance to use began to slip back out of him. He gritted his teeth and clenched his fist as though he could physically hold on to his title, but he was losing ground—Sam kept tugging with that unseen grip, reeling away at the worm beneath his skin, until some tipping point passed and Ash gasped and joined forces with Sam, shoving with all his soul.

The clammy roots of the Evil clung deep within his body, squirming about, snapping and regenerating as Sam drew them out only too slowly.

And Sam was tiring. The sickly gold flames began to fade from his eyes, and a drop of black blood trickled over his lip. Ash felt the balance between his human and Deadite selves wobbling. Sam’s exorcism tugged and snapped and slipped: a hexagon wrench stripping the bolt on a fire hydrant, chains spinning on black ice, an iron bullet in a werewolf. It was the wrong tool for the job, and it wasn’t going to work.

Everything was up to Ash, again. And didn’t that just figure, because Ash was a time-tested irredeemable A-1 fuck-up. He was gonna go Evil for good, tear down the world, and take Sharon and Ruth down with it.

Ruth. He grunted as though he could squeeze the possession out like a stubborn turd. Leave it to Good Old Ash to remember he had a daughter the moment it became tactically useful, but damn if he was gonna dwell on that, when he could picture Ruth with her meticulously rendered Lego Pegasus-factory, her seventeen precious plastic sparkly beads that she’d begged Sharon to braid into her hair every week for two months, her stubborn pout, her giddy laugh. His weird, spoiled, difficult, genius kid. He’d die here, never hold her hand again, never put a hand on her head to feel how tall she’d grown, and he’d die content if it meant she lived.

Sam was flagging, but psychics were all for uncomfortable physical contact, right? Ash crawled forward until he could lace his fingers with Sam’s outstretched hand. His palm burned, and a dry heat spread over his skin. Sam stared at him, startled, but his phantom grip kept digging and pulling and peeling, now with renewed strength and precision, and Ash summoned the warm fuzzy obdurate blood-primal love he felt for his only child to light up every corner of his mind. Together, they began to gain ground, the feelers shriveling and the rot crumbling away. Something cold sweated out of his palm; he opened his eyes and saw a green light trapped between his and Sam’s hands, felt the reprieve of the cut noose and the exultation of the chase triumphant.

They might as well have had a rattlesnake pinned between their palms. Another burst blood vessel from Sam or a break in Ash’s concentration, and the savage power would mesh itself back into one of them or go screaming off into the wild, but for the moment it was captive, it was mastered.

Dean chopped at reaching arms and dodged flung logs on one side of the clearing, and dread ponderous scissor-jawed larvae scraped crude barrows into the protesting earth on the other side; the army Ash and Sam had commanded was busy at the last tasks they’d received. They watched in horror over each-other’s shoulders, then locked eyes in perfect understanding made possible only by the psychic current of Sam’s demonic exorcism under Ash’s skin and perhaps by common sense.

“Listen up, dead-meat!” Ash bellowed. The log-throwing Deadites paused their assault on Dean, only fending him off now and then as he tried to hack through their line to reach Sam. “New plan. Everyone into the plant!”

The octopotamuses paused in their digging, and the Deadites turned skeptical white eyes at the float plant that shadowed them. “Boss, you sure about that? It’s on fire in there.”

Ash coughed and dropped his voice an octave. “’Course I am. Everyone into the plant!”

Sam coughed and spat blood to the side. “Are you questioning your orders?” he barked. “Were you elected by the Old Ones to serve as general? No? Then shut up and march, and if you make me repeat myself I swear to God I’ll come down on you like a ton of bricks and you’ll wish you’d never been spawned. Understood?”

“But it’s on fire—”

“Your general gave you an order!” Sam bawled like a drill sergeant, making Ash hunch up his shoulders around his ears.

“Yeah, everyone into the plant,” Ash repeated, and Sam shut his eyes and trembled ominously. He felt the Comission falling upon him again, the Evil seeping back into his palm, and he wasn’t ready, it wasn’t fair, God, Ruth, Ruth save him, Goddamn Sam was having a stroke on the job, and the Deadites would have their General, and he could lead an army of four dozen across the United States in a week or two, easy, just give him the chance.

But the Deadites and the octopotamuses were filing back to the float plant. A Deadite set its water-rotten hand upon the knob and pulled. The great cinderblock ruin seemed to gasp as the door opened, and then a great plume of flame roared out and incinerated the first five corpses in line for the door.

His army, Ash thought with a pang. His army that he didn’t know, didn’t want, couldn’t handle—Goddamn Old Ones, building a bunch of brainless gullible pawns that any cut-rate demon-psychic could order over a cliff—“Good work, boys, move it, move it!” he barked, and with a mental corkscrew, realigned his brain.

White heat blazed beyond the open service door of the float plant’s warehouse, where, freshly oxygenated, alcohols and petroleum distillates fed a glorious furnace of dripping steel and boiling acid. The hinges slumped and disintegrated, letting the door drop, smoking, to the moldy loam.

The Deadites filed in. The octopotamuses squeezed their bulky shoulders through the door, taking a few blocks out of the frame with them, but they disappeared into the crematory. The woods were emptied but for the shambling footprints of the Deadites, the horrible clawmarks of the amphibious beasts, and Dean, axe upraised and staring after the departed horde in confusion.

Together, Ash and Sam lowered their hands to the earth and shoved the Commission of the Old Ones back to the unhallowed void from whence it came.

Ash collapsed to the dirt and blinked until the blurriness went away. Sam wiped his nosebleed off on his sleeve in a move that he probably thought was subtle.

“The Magic of Friendship?” Dean yelled, lowering his axe and stalking toward them. “Seriously?”

Ash drew his fingers across his throat and glared.

Dean kept coming, ignored Ash, and offered a hand to his brother. “How you doing, Sammy?”

Sam was obviously not doing all that well; his skin still had that cadaverous Deadite pallor, though the gold light in his eyes was guttering out; black blood trickled stubbornly from his nose as he panted for air; in the creeping dawn, the bite in his neck was beginning to send out black shoots of poison under his skin again. Sam grimaced at Dean and pointed at the bite.

“Shouldn’t that burn out when the sun hits it?” Dean asked.

“Explode, maybe,” Ash said, and Sam did something complicated with his hands that looked like stabbing someone and then maybe a tornado or a draining bathtub. Dean made a little gltch noise with this throat, so apparently it meant nothing good. Sam pulled out a pocket knife, held it out to Dean, and pointed at Ash’s steel hand.

“Shit, Sammy,” Dean sighed, slumping to the ground beside Sam. He looked up at the lightening sky, the shade of the float plant. “How long’ve we got, ten minutes?” He took the knife. “You better lie down. This is gonna hurt.”

Sam lay flat on his stomach, a fold of his jacket between his teeth, and Dean knelt on his shoulders with the knife. Dean carved away at the bite wound quickly and confidently, peeling off neat strips of poisoned flesh like some kind of meat artist, as Sam grunted and panted through his nose.

Dean must be a great cook.

When he finished, Dean blotted the blood off with the sleeve of his shirt, checked one last time for missed veins of blackness, and let Sam up.

Sam pressed his palm against his bleeding throat, wobbled off out of the clearing, and slumped against the trunk of a maple tree, just in time to catch the first ray of sun full on his pale face. He yelped and fell over.

“Sammy!” Dean yelled, and sprinted to his side. Ash decided he’d been resting long enough, heaved himself to his feet, and shuffled over to join the party.

Sam lay on his side at the foot of the tree, black blood smeared all down his face and a trickle of red seeping through the black on his mauled throat. Ash kicked him lightly in the shin, and Sam stirred and blinked and shielded his eyes against the light.

Human, with irises and pupils and everything.

“Please tell me I’ve been hallucinating,” Sam moaned.

“No can do, sport,” Ash said. “How ‘bout we beat feet before the sun sets ahead of schedule again.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thermite is an actual thing. Look it up on Youtube. "Slippery Dick" sounds dirty but is actually a reference to disgraced former US president Richard Nixon, for our readers across the pond or across the border.
> 
> If you don't understand why Ash carries thermite ingredients and a magnesium fire starter around with him on a Hunt, you don't understand Ash and you don't understand America.
> 
> And, no, Dean did become a meat artist by preparing gourmet meals.


	7. Heroes' Return

They trooped back to the cars before noon, Ash and Dean battered and stiff, Sam light-headed and hung-over. Sam kept waiting for the cravings and hallucinations and telekinetic seizures of withdrawal to set in, but so far Deadite blood was proving to have entirely different side effects from demon blood. Pronounced, immediate, never-the-hell-again, over-and-done side effects.

He’d been evil. Fully, unambiguously, unrepentantly evil. Sam wondered what it meant that even in that state, his first priority had been to make Dean pay more attention to him. Some kinds of crazy just couldn’t be beat.

“Oh, shit,” Sam exclaimed, halting even as Ash and Dean were breaking into a trot at the sight of their vehicles. “We left Teddy.”

Ash grabbed Dean’s sleeve and stopped him. “Who—what?”

“Teddy Roosevelt,” Sam repeated, grabbing his phone. He pulled up the relevant photo, a shadowy form obscured by darkness and orbs. Dean squinted at it. “We left a fifteen-hundred-pound undead carnivorous moose running around. I can’t believe I forgot Teddy—”

“We’ll gank him once we know you’re not gonna go all Trainspotting on us,” Dean announced, grabbing Sam by the arm. “We’re going home or holing up somewhere on the way.”

Ash grabbed the phone out of Sam’s hand. “Goddamn it to shit, is that the date? Shit! Ten o’clock!”

“What’s wrong?” Sam asked, his fingers itching at the sight of his smartphone’s fragile screen in Ash’s steel fist.

“I gotta be in Kalamazoo by five—shit! Lost a whole goddamn day!”

Sam ran some numbers in his head. He had an old credit card, Harrison Connery, never ran a balance since they’d applied for it two years ago just when the Leviathan had started doing a better job tracking their fraudulent cards than the FBI or the actual card companies. He’d kept it around for sentimental reasons after Dean had disappeared. “Phone,” Sam demanded, and when Ash passed it back, he looked up regional airports and flights. Buffalo to O’Hare, too slow, too far from the destination. Syracuse to Detroit International, still no good. Syracuse to Detroit to Kalamazoo, over budget, too much lay-over; oh, yes, Albany to Grand Rapids. Pricey ticket, but money left over for a cab or rental.

“How’s a flight sound?” Sam asked. “I’d drive your van back for you, but I’m more likely to run it off the road to get away from the giant bats right now.”

Ash looked his van up and down and chewed on his lip. “I’ll take it. Where from?”

“Albany,” Sam said, and dug Harrison Connery out of his wallet. “Flight leaves in three hours, ninety minute trip. If you drive like hell and your car rental goes smoothly, you should make it less than an hour late.”

“I’d pay it now if I had it in checking,” Ash said, leaning over the phone. “What do I owe you?”

“Nothing,” Sam said.

Ash narrowed his eyes suspiciously.

“Seriously, nothing,” Sam repeated. “You kept Dean safe out there when I had other things on my mind; it’s the least I could do.” They pooled Sam’s bad debt and Ash’s legal ID and bought the ticket. Ash wrote the confirmation number on the back of his wrist. “You ever want some backup—”

“Not too likely.” Ash jerked his head at Dean. “All this for the guy who blows your brother’s ears out, huh?”

“He’ll be fine.”

Ash raised his eyebrows. “That’s not usually how—eh. Whatever. Godspeed you crazy sonsabitches.”

Sam offered his hand and Ash shook it.

 

* * *

 

Dean watched Sam and Ash have their little conference over the I-Phone, watched Sam pull out a two-year-old burn card that he’d apparently kept around through his civilian vacation as a bizarre, incriminating, incredibly lame souvenir. Well, Sam had made a new friend. Nice. Sam had always had terrible taste in friends, but as long as Dean was around, it wouldn’t get him killed.

“Ash, buddy, gimme a sec?” Dean asked, and steered Ash away from Sam and toward Ash’s waiting van. Dean scowled and Ash bristled. “Here’s the deal,” Dean growled, shooting for a low but vehement pitch. “You saw some shit nobody else has seen, nobody else except Bobby Singer. I know there’s rumors about Sam, but that’s all they are, rumors, half of it demon-talk.

“You want to take Sam out, you won’t. You come fifty miles from Sam, I’ll come for you. I hear one whisper about Sam drinking blood or wearing yellow eyes or commanding a demon army, I will hunt you down because it’s been years since we heard the last of all that shit. I’ll finish that pruning job you started. Take you apart. It’ll take days, and if luck has it and you go where I hope you go, all that blood and agony will be just the preview for the rest of your afterlife. Stay away from Sam. Capiche?”

Ash gave him a thumb’s up, hopped into his van, and drove away like he was late for a very important date.

Dean turned back toward the Impala, and saw Sam scowling at him from across its roof. “ _What?_ ”

 

* * *

 

 

Ash left the van in the parking garage at Albany International. He gritted his teeth through the ticket lines. He shucked boots, belt, coats, shoulder harness, stump cover, and hand at the metal detectors, standing half-naked and bloodied in the terminal. He dressed, bought an eyeglass repair kit at the duty free store, then bolted for the gate when he realized the flight being announced on the intercom was his own. He gritted his teeth through the line to board the plane. He bummed a handful of wet wipes off the flight attendant to tidy himself up, and bummed a handful of napkins to stem the bleeding from the back of his skull when Dean had tried to take his head off. He re-calibrated, tightened, and scraped dirt out of his hand with the eyeglass kit. He ignored the horrified silence of his neighbors and the petulant wailing of their small children. He drank a ginger ale. He browsed the Sky Mall catalogue. He gritted his teeth through the descent and the line to get off the plane, and was marching through the terminal steeling himself for the rental car agency when he was accosted by two official-looking men in blue suits.

“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to come with us,” the taller man said, flashing him a legitimate-looking NSA badge.

Ash took a very deep breath and reminded himself that now would be the worst possible time to go opening his smart mouth. “Aw, god,” he moaned. They flanked him and escorted him into a little mirror-windowed office by the baggage claims, where they could see out but the other travelers could not see in. The walls were lined with tables of other people’s luggage in various stages of dissection. A little forest of barricade belt posts sat forlornly in one corner. The floor was covered with a plastic tarp.

“Is it the hand?” Ash asked. “It’s always the hand. It’s a prosthesis. I let the TSA guys paw at it already, I ran it through the X-Ray. I have a disability—well, not usually, but if you made me take it off I would. I’m trying to play ball with you guys. I just want to make it to my daughter’s dance recital, show my ex I can be responsible, you get it, right? Spooks gotta reproduce somehow—”

“Where are Sam and Dean Winchester?” the shorter agent demanded.

Ash swallowed. “Okay, no,” he said. “Crap, you’re asking how I got that card. It’s a fake, isn’t it—it’s from a buddy of mine, calls himself, uh, Harry, we all joke about crazy Harry and his shady past, but I never thought it was actually true—”

“Screw it, this guy’s gonna babble all night,” the tall agent snapped. He pointed at the center of the tarp. “Stand there, please.”

Warily, Ash stepped toward the tarp, wondering when the cuffs or the camera would come into play.

The tall agent leaned into Ash’s face, opened his mouth so wide the top of his head flipped back, and snarled at him, a hinged remora-face with rows of triangular teeth flashing and forked tongue waggling. Ash punched him in the chin and he went down. He bolted off the tarp, feet skidding on plastic. “Man, you had me going,” he panted, digging frantically among the confiscated cameras and knitting needles and RC cars that littered the sorting table for something weaponizeable. “Guess this means the CCTV’s off. You’re those new things with the stupid weak-sauce, what, Behemoth or Gamera or Architeuthis or whatever the hell—”

The shorter agent charged at him, game-face slavering, just as Ash found the fire extinguisher under the table and shot him a maw-full of foam. He went down, sputtering. Ash clubbed him in the head to keep him down, dodged across the room, and grabbed one of the heavy-based barrier poles from the clump in the corner. The tall agent had recovered from the punch and was barreling at him, head lowered and jaws front; Ash took a low swing and whacked the top of his skull off, splattering the one-way glass with black goo. As the shorter one struggled to his feet, Ash stepped in and clubbed him back down, then chopped, in huge, two-handed swings, until the blunt base of the aisle marker pulped his neck into pudding. Ash kicked the head free and kissed the dented pole.

The wreckage of the taller agent gave a phlegmy growl and reached vaguely for Ash’s ankle. Ash dodged away. “Close enough.”

 He wiped the worst of the goo off onto a teddy bear that started singing “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” when squeezed, kicked the agents’ heads a little further from the bodies, slipped out, and locked the door behind him.

He gritted his teeth through the paperwork for the rental car and gritted his teeth through the hour-long drive as his back and hamstrings stiffened beyond all hope of straightening. He made it into the school parking lot at five twenty-seven. The lot was full, so he parked on the lawn under the modernist sculpture that looked like a sentient wash-cloth sopping with alphabet soup.

After failing to convince the parent volunteer at the door that he was, in fact, a parent, let alone Ruth’s—“Use your eyes, lady! She’s got my chin!”—he barged into the darkened auditorium, frightened middle-aged women trying to drag him out by both arms, muddy, disheveled, blood and slime ground into all the edges and seams of his skin and clothing, reeking of two days’ running terrified in the Adirondacks, and wearing the slasher smile of end-stage sleep deprivation. He shook off his escorts and sidestepped through the rows to the nearest empty seat, where he dropped with a thud to lean forward with his elbows on his knees. The stage was bright. A troop of graceful little girls in blue dresses were capering on tiptoes across the stage to complicated Russian harpsichord music, a recording, had to be, and when did Ruth’s class dance? He’d missed her, he must have—these things sent the littlest kids out first, moving up through the skill levels, so they wouldn’t have to feel clumsy compared to the older kids, and Ruth was—

Ruth was right there on the end.

Her dark hair was wrangled into little spiral braids she’d always hated to sit through. Her skinny arms were upstretched, her knobby knees fluttered over the floor in perfect time with the notes pouring from the sound system, her fingers were in the funny lobster-claw the ballet teachers had taught her, and her upturned face was a mask of peace and concentration.

She wasn’t a stumpy little kid playing ballerina anymore. She’d worked hard for this. She was dancing, really dancing, and in that moment, if anyone had asked him where he saw his daughter in ten years, he’d have said Julliard, easy. You show ‘em, tiger.

The dance ended with a final jump not thirty seconds later, and all the little girls in their fluffy blue dresses pranced in two rows toward either side of the stage, and a bunch of little boys in oversized T-shirts done up to look like peasant robes marched into the center. The music faded slightly. Ash stood up, whooped, and bellowed, “That’s my girl!”

Ruth, just reaching the edge of the stage, paused and stared out at the audience for a moment, until her departing classmates dragged her after them.

Ash sat back down and picked dried blood out of his hair while the rest of the kids got their limelight, grade by grade. He soon had an empty seat on either side, and that was fine with him; he took his boots off and rubbed spit on his blisters. The lights crept back up an hour later, and as the parents around him got to their feet, he felt a sharp grip land on his shoulder and a stone sink into his stomach.

He leaned his head back against Sharon’s chest. “Told you I’d make it.”

Sharon stared down at him, tense, unreadable. “Ruth’s friends are going to Chuck E. Cheese’s,” she announced after an uncomfortable silence. “Meet us there.”

 

* * *

 

 

Sharon was waiting outside the kiddie casino when Ash pulled up in his econobox. She grabbed him by the elbow and steered him through the massive arcade to the dining booths in the back. Ash snagged a menu on the way. After the night he’d had, he could eat a plate-full of lard. ‘Course, way his guts were squirming right now, he might puke it all up on Sharon. No telling yet whether that would be a good or bad thing.

Ash hailed a pimply waiter and demanded breadsticks, and then he and Sharon settled in to stare at each-other across the table. She’d buttoned her suit jacket, either to keep Ash from staring at The Twins or to hide the bloodstains on her blouse from pressing up against the back of Ash’s head. She still had those Venusian curves that never let Ash leave her alone and that don’t-screw-with-me warface that had kept him at shouting distance for their first six months. She’d gone back to the look she’d worn in her college photos, a gel-slicked Halle Berry crop. Ash, well, he could see in the dining room mirror how rough he looked, but it was nothing Sharon hadn’t seen before.

“Let’s just get this over with, huh?” Ash started, tired of the ding and jangle of the nearby pinball machine and his ex’s silent scrutiny. “I’m sorry. It was inappropriate. I won’t do it again.”

Sharon sighed and folded her arms on the table. “Define ‘it.’”

“Barging in on the kids’ program. Being late. Cheering—embarrassing you and the kid—what’re you trying to do to me here? Throw me a bone.”

“If I was that afraid of being embarrassed I’d’ve been a fool to marry you in the first place,” Sharon replied.

Ash spread his arms rhetorically.

“Look, Ash,” she said, leaning in. “I’m not trying to scold you. I’m not your wife anymore, and I’m certainly not your mother. I just want us to get a few things straight. About Ruthie.”

Ash’s hunger died like a candle in a bathtub. “What about Ruthie?”

“Why didn’t you fight me for visitation rights?” Sharon’s voice was calm, flat. Her acrylic nails were digging little rings into the skin above her elbows, but her voice was calm.

“’Cause it’s no life for a kid, shuttling around all the time,” Ash said, repeating the very words he’d given her in mediation. “The harder we fight, the worse it gets.”

Sharon raised an eyebrow. “You see, I’m just now starting to believe you. When I put in for a transfer, I gave you warning. You could have asked us to stay. You could have followed us. You could have visited. You could have made Ruthie one of those divorce kids always shuttling around. You said you were trying to be the ‘bigger man’ here, but seemed to me you weren’t taking us seriously. And I tried to keep quiet around Ruthie, but when you damn near disappeared after we moved, let me tell you, she drew her own conclusions.”

Ash had dry throat. The pimply waiter swept in and slapped a stack of breadsticks on the table. “So what was I supposed to do?” he rasped, ignoring the food.

“I don’t know. Now I’m gonna tell you a little story, with a whole load of ‘I’ statements. It’s annoying, but you’re probably due a taste of what you feed everyone else on a weekly basis.

“When I was a little girl, I never dreamed of being a retail pharmacist, standing behind a glass wall all day telling people what pills they can or can’t take with food. When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a hair-dresser. But because I graduated third in my class, I went to college.

“In college, I wanted to study linguistics, maybe population biology. But I didn’t. I went biochem major, women’s studies minor, because biochem pays off and women’s studies was easy and I was working nights. I joined the business club so I could have it on my resumé, went to just enough meetings to keep my membership. I applied for scholarships left and right, and you’d think I was in the CIA for all the identities I made up for those essays; World Wildlife Federation one week, NRA the next. I didn’t go to medical school because of the residency time, didn’t go to nursing school because of the hours. When I got into pharmacy school, I didn’t bust my butt to be the best pharmacist I could be, I busted my butt to get a job and get out of debt in under ten years.

“I did everything short of sleeping my way to the podium, and why? Because unlike all those third-generation college grad classmates of mine, I wasn’t playing a game. They wanted to make Daddy proud; well, my daddy was as proud as he was ever gonna get. They wanted to prove themselves; I just wanted the prize.

“I got a job my first year out, close to family, paid well enough. I paid off my loans. I got a 401-K. I bought a condo. You came along, and Ruthie, and I bought a house and started a college account, because _I was ready for her._ In a year or two I’ll get her a puppy. She’s got all I never had. She wants to blow it on a major in social linguistics or Persian mythology, more power to her if she wants to play the game.

“But I’ve always been dead serious about my future, and now I’m dead serious about hers.

“So my question is, Ash, why did you let us go so easy? Because the last thing our daughter needs is a daddy who thinks of her as some kind of hobby.”

Ash stared at the joints of his hand as he flexed it slowly open and shut on the table. “Ruth’s the only thing I’ve ever done right, and I’d save or burn down the world for her,” he said at last, “and everything I touch turns to shit.”

Sharon squinted at him. “What gave you an existential crisis?”

Ash shrugged.

“Ruth’s a tough girl,” Sharon said. “You could hurt her, easy, if you’re not careful. But nothing could make her turn to shit.”

Ash sighed deeply and shoved a breadstick in his mouth. “She’s gotten huge.”

“Tall,” Sharon corrected him. “It gets to me, too. She’s growing up—you should see the jeans she tries to get me to buy her.”

“No tramp jeans,” Ash agreed, swallowed, and grabbed two more breadsticks.

Sharon took one from her side of the platter and smothered it in marinara sauce. “What the hell happened to you?” she wondered.

“Hunt,” Ash grunted. “Took some partners along. Never again. Say, what’s with the Accord? Benz not classy enough for ya?”

Sharon rubbed her eyebrows with the hand not holding the breadstick. “Ash. Ex-honey. I was very touched by the Benz. I’ve seen your bank accounts, I can guess which ones you cleaned out for it; you couldn’t afford to give us a used Geo, let alone a Benz. But I told you before—it costs to insure it. It costs to drive it. And if there’s one thing cars do better than crash, it’s depreciate. I bought the Accord with the money from the Benz—”

“But the warding—I busted my ass welding that on there—”

“And I copied the sigils onto the Accord’s undercarriage with a forty-dollar Dremmel,” Sharon continued. “Now some banking executive is driving around on one of the most heavily-warded cars in the US, and Ruth and I are in the other one. We’re saving the money.”

“Warding’s extremely technical—” Ash muttered.

“It’s copy and paste. I got pulled over twice on the way to the dealership. It was a sweet idea, but you’re an idiot.”

Ash let it go. “You know why I didn’t ask you to stay?” he asked. “’Cause it’s safer this way. Deadites follow me around, and if I stopped taking ‘em apart, maybe they’d leave me alone, but I’m not scum enough to do that—I brought them here. I have a responsibility and one of these days it’ll kill me.”

“Not much different form cops and firemen,” Sharon said. “And they raise families. You think losing her father is gonna break our little girl? She’s already lost her father.” She glanced meaningfully at one of the mirrors that flanked the booths so parents could spy on their offspring. Ruth was a couple games down, murdering away at a whack-a-mole game with a foam mallet.

“Nice reflexes,” said Ash weakly.

“In a few years, she’ll be a regular Michonne.”

“That’d be your genes,” Ash said. “So what’s the play here? I messed us up. Bad. But there’s people so much more screwed than us who still stick together. Not sure that’s a good thing or not. But we mighta gave up too soon. Could we fix this?”

Sharon leaned back, her eyes very wide. “One thing at a time,” she said. “Do you want your daughter to know you love her, or not?”

“’Course I do,” Ash exclaimed.

“Good. Here she comes.”

Ash looked back up at the mirror, and Ruth had finished her game and disappeared. She popped around the side of their booth, not just her, but a half-dozen of her closest friends and their game tickets and stuffed animal prizes. Ruth had a huge gobstopper in her cheek. She stared at him very quietly, her eyes very wide and white.

The other girls more than made up the noise, all “Who’s this?” “Is that really your dad?” “Why’s he got armor on his hand?” “Hi, Ruth’s Dad!”

“Why’d you miss Parents’ Day?” Ruth asked at last.

Parents’ Day? The hell was Parents’ Day? He sent a pleading look to Sharon, but apparently divorce meant she didn’t have to help him save face in front of the kid anymore. “Never heard of it.” Ruth’s face crumpled a little and he held out his arms. “Why don’t you tell me about it? What’d they make you guys do?”

“We made a diorama, or we assembled a chocolate dessert,” said Ruth, scooting onto the bench beside him, small and hunched. “I made a diorama. It was a poured concrete bunker, with check-points. There were arc-lamps and a fire-moat, and the doors have a robotic portcullis to shove all the enemies into the moat. I wanted you to come see so I could explain it. It’s like Show and Tell.”

“Sugar-Plum, that sounds awesome,” Ash said.

“I didn’t get a gold star,” Ruth said. “Jake and Amy got gold stars, even though theirs weren’t as good, because their dads explained the workspaces, and I didn’t want to build a pharmacy because of all the labels.”

 _Help,_ Ash mouthed at Sharon.

“The week before was Take Your Child To Work Day. They built dioramas of their parents workspaces.”

“That’s one plus to working in a cube farm,” Ash muttered. He turned down to Ruth. “That’s an awesome idea. Not a week goes by I don’t wish I had a fire moat.”

“Why did you get to the dance recital late?” Ruth demanded.

His was a cruel, entitled child. “I tried to get here on time,” he said.

“Do or do not, there is no—”

“I was half-way on time, and that counts. Don’t get smart with your dad. I had to decapitate two slime monsters with a blunt object, rent a car two sizes too small, and leave my van in Albany to get here, but I did it. I’d do anything for you, kid, but saving the world comes first.”

“You got to eat your vegetables before you get ice cream,” said Ruth, folding against him with a sigh, and Ash rested his arm on her shoulders, a long hidden tension unwinding within.

“Just like that,” he said. “And Lady Luck always dishes me up a huge heaping plate full of vegetables.”

Ruth stole the last breadstick. Her friends piled into the booth, trapping Ash and Sharon in the corners and staring at the novelty of a grown man in desperate need of a shower, a change of clothes, and twenty hours’ sleep who wasn’t on the street corner asking for change. “Tell me about the slime monsters,” Ruth asked.

“Which ones? The Triassic toads or the ones pretending to be government spies?”

“Mmmm—both.”

It was so familiar—just like those few short long-past years when he’d thought he could be a dad, when he’d thought he could be anything. “Okay, children,” Sharon warned from across the table, “Ruth’s dad likes to tell scary stories and pretend they’re real. If you don’t get to listen to scary stories, walk away or don’t go telling anybody about what you shouldn’t be listening to in the first place. Understand?”

Ruth looked up at Ash and winked. He winked back.

“Couple days ago, I got a call from a colleague. What’s a colleague? Well, a colleague’s like an annoying friend who never leaves you alone but has all the answers to all the tests so you can’t get rid of him. He had a job for me, out of state, but he wanted me for it because I was the best in the business of saving the world from the dread legions of the Evil Dead.

“So I drove to New York, deep into the woods where the hill-billies live, and I meet these two brothers who saved the world a time or two themselves. Turns out, they were both idiots, and in the end it was up to me to save them, and the world, by myself. The usual.

“We did a little fitness test to make sure we could each cleave a Deadite’s head from its shoulders at a single blow, reconned the area, and headed off into the woods to fight Evil. Dam—darn, those were black, moldy woods. Like that scary part in _Snow White_.”

“What about the slime monsters?”

“I’m getting to that part. God, this must be what my dad went through every day.”

 

* * *

 

 

The Winchester Impala hummed West at seventy miles an hour, Kansas-bound. _Ballbreaker_ was cranked up so loud the bass rattled the Legos in the heating vent and Sam could almost hear ghosts reciting Shakespeare in the static of the tape. Sam was an awkward blanket-wrapped bundle of misery in the passenger seat. Every ten minutes or so, Dean would holler a number, one through five, and Sam could wave that many fingers at him. Dean’s way of checking him for delirium while driving. Sam wasn’t sure where they’d stop if he started hallucinating—maybe a cornfield or an abandoned silo—but so far, he hadn’t experienced anything more dangerous than a migraine, a low-grade fever, and the gnawing unending desire to make it stop, god, make the music stop, the car stop, Dean stop, and give him twelve hours of darkness and silence.

But Dean was spooked and Dean drove when he was spooked.

“Hey!” Dean yelled after a day and a half of this earthly torment.  “I think I hear the lyrics in my left ear!”

“Hallelujah,” Sam muttered and reached for the volume knob. Dean slapped his hand away.

Vintage Dean Winchester. Cock rock, overprotectiveness, and casual violence. Sam had grown up with this particular facet of Dean, knew his creaks and buttons and wants and fears; he had relied on this Dean. But this was not the Dean who’d returned a month ago carrying that stone axe: the real one, maybe, certainly the new one.

New Dean was cautious, discriminating, impartial. He’d seemed as at home in the woods as a fur trapper or a timber wolf. He’d stood by Sam through the Deadite possession fiasco, but that was habit as much as anything. When he’d returned from this second underworld voyage, he’d seen Sam’s life apart, Sam’s patchwork romance and plastic-spoon-happiness, and judged it treason. Sam had always been a burden and a loose cannon. Dean had changed, and he was seeing Sam with fresh eyes. How could Sam blame him for not liking what he saw? What right did Sam have to Dean’s friendship, though he’d never lived without that bedrock?

“I wish you’d let me in, man,” Sam murmured, secure in Dean’s temporary handicap. “I know I don’t have the right to ask—but when it’s just you and me it gets so goddamn lonely when you don’t.”

Dean hummed, tapping the steering wheel the way he’d done since he’d been twenty, the rawboned soul showing in the tension at the corners of his eyes as he watched the road.

“Guess I’ll have to earn it,” Sam supposed, and he piled the blankets back over his head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ash vs. Leviathan (See Supernatural Season 8): it's a draw.
> 
> Here Sharon gets on my soap-box about financial responsibility and where the American educational system has gone wrong. Anyone who tells you money isn't important either has never had any money or has never not had way too much money. Money is power. Power is security, freedom, and respect, and these things can be worth sacrificing for.
> 
> And if only divorce could be so simple!
> 
> Thanks for reading.


End file.
